A Hong Kong biotech firm has designed a filter that removes some of the toxic chemicals from cigarette smoke but leaves the tobacco flavor intact, Forbes reports in its upcoming Nov. 16 issue.

The company, Filigent, has developed the MicroBlue filter, which biochemically attracts and traps carcinogens in tobacco smoke. Research has shown that Filigent's Generation 3 filter removes 40-75 percent of the chemicals known to cause DNA mutations, for example.

"For years the public health community has just assumed that the smoke from cigarettes is all bad," said Scott Ballin, director for the Alliance for Health, Economic & Agriculture Development, a group funded by tobacco-state interests. "Now advances in basic science have given us a much more nuanced understanding of what's in that stuff -- what's harmful and what's mainly benign."

Only a fraction of smokers who try to quit actually succeed, so products like MicroBlue could improve smokers' health without them really noticing. "People normally hate reduced-harm cigarettes. But this is different: It does not affect the flavor or the nicotine experience at all," said Canadian tobacco distributor Edward Roundpoint, a Filigent customer.

"We are in the business of saving lives," said Filigent CEO Melissa Mowbray-d'Arbela.

Worldwide, the cigarette filter business is worth $9 billion. The Fact brand of so-called 'reduced risk' cigarette used a Filigent filter when it went on the market in 2005, but state attorneys general got the product pulled from the marketplace on charges of making unsubstantiated health claims.