Milking It
A New Line of Defense Could be as Close as Mother’s Milk
Scientists are getting closer to coming up with an immune-boosting substance that could prevent people from getting sick by studying something long known for its healing powers: breast milk.
Cincinnati Children’s is the leading institution in an international research consortium that has a $6 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to investigate how human milk – specifically large sugars in it called ligosaccharides – can help protect people of all ages from infectious diseases.
Investigators have discovered we release the same kind of sugars found in mother’s milk in our intestinal tract. And those sugar sites in our intestinal tract are often where germs like to bind and start infections. One of the benefits of breast milk is that it can help steer athogens in a different direction, says Ardythe L. Morrow, PhD, director of the new Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Human Milk Lactation at Cincinnati Children’s and the study’s lead investigator.
“Mother’s milk provides the same structure but says, ‘Hey, over here,’” she says. “So it binds to the sugar in milk instead of to the sugar on the surface of our intestinal tract. By binding it, then, it neutralizes it, and it passes through the intestinal tract.”
Sweet Relief
That helps explain how breastfed babies can encounter a germ and develop an antibody response without getting sick, Morrow says.
But the more significant part of the research is not just how mother’s milk protects babies against infection. It’s the realization that this could be developed into a new line of defense if researchers can replicate the sugar structures as a medical food or supplement that could prevent people from getting sick.
Cincinnati Children’s is so interested in thepotential of human milk research it’s creating a center for it in the Perinatal Institute, and Morrow is stepping down as division director of Biostatistics and Epidemiology to lead it.
This kind of research is far more detailed than “is breastfeeding good or not?” she says. “The idea of using the human milk igosaccharides as a new form of medication – there are very few groups working on in the world.”
The Science of Sugar
Researchers are concentrating on understanding the variations in human milk, specifically which sugars are in some mothers and babies and not others, and what those variations might mean in terms of which germs like to bind to which sugars.
“They home in on their docking site, if you will,” Morrow says, and scientists are figuring out where and how they attach and who, genetically speaking, has “secretor sugars” with a particular structure. to them.
“The idea of mothers being called secretors or not, or babies being secretors or not, is really whether they have a gene present that makes these structures,” she says. “If the mother has those structures in her milk – secretor oligosaccharides – she can protect against certain infectious agents that like to bind to those sugars.”
Scientists are beginning to try to replicate secretor sugars for potential use in medicines or supplements. Investigators are beginning to plan They’re planning animal studies and are working toward human ones. studies within a few years.
“This is a whole new line of antimicrobial approach that’s going to have global dissemination within the next five to 10 years,” Morrow says. “This is the next generation of scientific investigation.”
