FRANKFORT — A state board that funds farm diversification projects took a fling at venture capitalism Friday. It voted to invest $255,000 in a company that is trying to use tobacco plants to produce cancer-fighting proteins.

        If the company's feasibility study leads to clinical trials and then to production, Kentucky tobacco growers would have a lucrative new market, boosters of the proposal said.

        The idea “has lots of facets, opportunities and broad, broad implications for Kentucky farmers,” Sam Lawson, of Bowling Green, told his colleagues on the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board.

        The company, ApoImmune of Louisville, is lining up backers for its production of “human therapeutics” — customized proteins to get the body's own immune system to attack and kill cancers and other diseases, including diabetes.

        The company thinks it can use its proteins to create cancer vaccines for specific patients within hours, as opposed to weeks, William F. Pearse Jr., ApoImmune's president and chief executive officer, told the board.

        There was considerable debate, as well as questions that Mr. Pearse and ApoImmune senior scientist David McClure could not answer. Chief among them: How much money could a tobacco farmer make?

        Profit potential is speculative, Mr. Pearse and Mr. McClure said, though cancer treatment is a $50 billion industry while diabetes treatment consumes $100 billion a year. Said Mr. McClure: “We're talking about an entirely new product. There is no such product now.”

        Two things are at issue: the efficacy of ApoImmune's proteins and whether they can be produced effectively in tobacco as opposed to what the rest of the industry uses, “which is Chinese hamster ovaries, of all things,” Mr. Pearse said.

        Some members of an advocacy group, Community Farm Alliance, said the ApoImmune project sounded impressive, but they were dubious about the board's eagerness to back it.

        “Why are they coming to the "ag' board when it looks like they could go to any venture capital firm?” asked Martin Richards, a farmer from Mercer County. “We're talking about funding a feasibility study for a corporation that's not farmers.”

        Mr. Lawson, the board member, had no such qualms. “I, for one, hope they make a gazillion dollars ... so when they write those checks for tobacco, they'll go right through the bank.”

        To some other board members, such as Wayne Hunt of Herndon, ApoImmune seemed to be offering a chance at redemption for a crop now associated with lethal health hazards.

        “I can't imagine anything better than finding that tobacco could be a cure for cancer,” he said.

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