How the next breakthrough may be in a glass of milk!

COULD having chemotherapy for cancer be as easy as drinking a glass of milk? Scientists in the U.S. claim they have found a way to turn the toxic tumour treatment, mainly given as an injection into a vein in the arm, into something patients can drink instead.

It could mean cancer patients, who often need to attend hospital every day for a week for chemotherapy, can consume their medicine at home from a glass.

Patients would have a daily dose of milk chemo as they would with injections.

The unlikely new form of therapy is based on the science behind how mothers pass on infection-fighting antibodies to their babies through breast milk.

Normally, anything that passes through the stomach gets broken down by the acidic environment so it can be digested.

This means many drugs — including most of those used for chemotherapy — cannot be swallowed, as digestion would destroy them before they had a chance to get into the bloodstream.

But scientists at the University of Colorado believe that they may be able to ‘smuggle’ chemotherapy medicine through the stomach using milk.

Antibodies in a mother’s breast milk do not get destroyed by the baby’s stomach acid and pass unscathed into the bloodstream. Tiny particles, called exosomes, in the mother’s milk seem to protect the antibodies. They bind to receptors in the tissue lining the baby’s intestines once they have passed through the stomach.

These receptors allow the antibodies to penetrate into the bloodstream and trigger a reaction by the immune system so that it is primed to attack an invading organism in the future.

And cow’s milk is similar enough to human milk that the exosomes in it bind with these receptors in humans.

The team in Colorado has been given funding by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to incorporate chemotherapy medicine into exosomes in cow’s milk. Scientists are experimenting with chemo drugs in a lab to see which ones are able to attach to the milk particles.

A separate study in 2017 by scientists at the University of Louisville in Kentucky found that mice given milk containing the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel (used to treat breast, ovarian and lung cancers) saw a 60 per cent reduction in the size of their lung tumours after taking it daily for a week. The mice suffered fewer of the side-effects seen with chemotherapy treatment — including severe nausea, exhaustion and hair loss.

Since paclitaxel is a licensed drug, and milk is readily available, the treatment could be used in the next three to five years if research proves it is safe and effective.

Cancer Research UK’s head information nurse Martin Ledwick said: ‘Anything that makes the delivery of chemotherapy drugs easier for patients has to be a good thing.

‘Some drugs can be given orally, but many need to be through an intravenous drip.

‘More work needs to be done to see if these experiments work in humans. But, if they do, it could reduce the discomfort and other problems associated with having a drip.’