A personalized vaccine made using tobacco plants - normally associated with causing cancer rather than helping cure it - could aid people with lymphoma in fighting the disease, US researchers said on Monday.

The treatment, which would vaccinate cancer patients against their own tumor cells, is made using a new approach that turns genetically engineered tobacco plants into personalized vaccine factories.

"This is the first time a plant has been used for making a protein to inject into a person," said Dr. Ron Levy of Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.