A safer cigarette? Tobacco companies testing alternatives

Tobacco companies have begun "clinical trials" to assess whether a range of prototype "safer cigarettes" really do slash levels of toxic chemicals entering the body.

The job of regulating any health claims firms might want to make for these cigarettes, or restricting whether they bring such products onto the market at all, has been handed over to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration - a move some say could improve the quality and availability of scientific research on cigarettes in general.

"What I hope it will do is make it harder for tobacco companies to market products without some evidence that they are likely to reduce the death and disease associated with smoking," says Thomas Eissenberg, a drug dependence researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University.

But anti-smoking campaigners say so-called healthier cigarettes should never find their way to market.

"I would be extremely skeptical of any attempt to produce healthy cigarettes," says Deborah Arnott of anti-smoking charity ASH-UK.

Many tobacco companies across the world are already pinning their hopes of future growth on the development of so-called "potentially reduced exposure products." These include:

• Snus. Long-favored by Scandinavians seeking a nicotine fix, snus is a moist form of powdered tobacco that releases nicotine when placed under the upper lip. It's banned in many countries, but advocates believe snus could provide a safer alternative to cigarettes.

• Reduced toxicant cigarettes: Several tobacco companies are creating cigarettes with modified filters and new blends of tobacco in the hope of lowering amounts of carcinogens.

• E-cigarettes: Electronics company Ruyan of Beijing, China, has come up with a battery-powered device that delivers nicotine when you puff on it. Ruyan says it sold over 300,000 e-cigarettes in 2008. But David Burns of the University of California-San Diego cautions there is little information on how smokers use them, and how much nicotine and other toxicants they inhale.

Meanwhile, the prospect of having their claims vetted by government is prompting companies to devise new, more accurate ways to test the health impact of cigarettes.

Traditionally, tobacco companies look at the chemical composition of tobacco and the smoke it produces when drawn through a "smoking machine" to assess its potential for harm. But machines don't reflect the way real people smoke - smokers often puff harder on "low-tar" cigarettes to get the same experience of smoking, for example.

So companies are searching for new ways to assess a person's exposure to the toxicants in smoke. The most promising approach is to look for biomarkers such as the carcinogen pyrene in body fluids like urine.

British American Tobacco has identified several biomarkers which it is using to compare the amounts of toxicants smokers get from conventional cigarettes against prototype cigarettes that have been modified to be less harmful. A pilot study looked at concentrations of nicotine metabolites and three toxicants - NNK, acrolein and pyrene - in the urine of 150 smokers, with 50 non-smokers as controls. It found that urine levels of nicotine correlated with the levels of the cigarettes the volunteers smoked.

Meanwhile, U.S. tobacco giant Philip Morris recently conducted a similar trial of 100 smokers provided with conventional or prototype cigarettes with modified filters. The company reports a reduction in toxicants in people smoking the prototype cigarettes.

Can we trust such claims? "If they come up with a biomarker of risk or exposure I think we'd be silly not to be extremely interested in it," Eissenberg says. "But we would have to independently verify it simply because there isn't the level of trust for us to accept that."

Eissenberg points out that there may be another, more cynical reason to give tobacco companies a second chance. "I think that there are some very smart people in the tobacco industry who have realized that if their customer base lives until they're 80 instead of dying when they're 60, then they're going to make a lot more money," he says.