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Article: Milk therapy: breast-milk compounds could be a tonic for adult ills.
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- December 9, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Catharina Svanborg thought that she already knew how remarkable breast milk is. The immunologist had logged hundreds of lab hours documenting ways in which human milk helps babies fight infections. But when the group decided to use cancerous lung cells to avoid the variability shown by normal cells in laboratory tests, Svanborg and her team at Lund University in Sweden were in for a surprise. They applied breast milk to the cancerous lung cells, and all the cells died. Breast milk killed cancer cells.
"From that moment on, we've been working with it," Svanborg says. Svanborg's serendipitous discovery of human milk's anticancer power is remarkable, but other ...