Cancer Patients’ ‘Violent’ Chemo Symptom Relieved via Unlikely Source

Scientists may have found a cure for some of chemotherapy’s most severe side effects, and it’s from a rather unlikely source: human breast milk.

“There are up to 200 sugars in human breast milk,” Steven Townsend, a chemistry professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, told Newsweek. “But we’ve only been studying them for about 10 to 12 years.”

By studying these sugars, Townsend hopes to develop new treatments for a range of health and industrial applications. “The biggest question is ‘how do we start to treat people with medicines that don’t destroy them?'” he said.

When it comes to treatments with severe side effects, chemotherapy is one of the most debilitating. “When my mom was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, she was like, ‘I don’t care that my nails are falling off. I don’t care that my hair is falling out. What sucks is that I have this violent diarrhea throughout the day, every day,” Townsend said.

This stomach sickness is caused by mucositis—inflammation that destroys the cells that line our stomachs and exposes them to the strong acid in our stomachs.

“We have this situation where we know why people who undergo chemotherapy get sick,” Townsend said. “And we’ve found molecules in breast milk that can prevent that.”

In particular, Townsend and his colleague, Fang Yan, found that a sugar called 2′-fucosyllactose may exert protective effects on these lining cells and minimize the damage caused by chemotherapy. In a study published in the journal Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology in October 2022, the team found that 2′-fucosyllactose successfully prevented the death of stomach-lining cells in mice who had induced mucositis.

Theoretically, if these sugars were given to patients alongside chemotherapy, it might offer relief to patients suffering from these side effects. “Maybe they only get diarrhea once per day instead of 50 times,” Townsend said.

But it’s not just cancer patients who struggle with severe treatment-induced side effects.

“My wife was bitten by a brown recluse spider a few years ago,” Townsend said. “The bite got infected, so they had to remove the tissue on her leg and give her [the antibiotic] vancomycin. And she was sick for 24 days after. Because yes, vancomycin is going to get rid of your infection, but it’s also going to completely destroy your microbiome.

“People are vastly healthier now with antibiotics. They work. They’re phenomenal. But maybe there are things that have evolved alongside us humans that can protect us just as well as antibiotics without making us sick?”

Breastmilk contains a unique cocktail of “good” bacteria that help infants develop their own microbiomes and protect them from infections.

“[The breast milk] microbiome is seeded by the sugars that are present in breast milk,” Townsend said.

Several studies have shown that these sugars not only support “good” bacteria but may also kill the “bad” ones. If combined with antibiotics, these sugars may allow us to clear bacterial infections while preserving our resident “good” bacteria.

“If you take smaller amounts of antibiotics combined with these sugars, the sugars make the antibiotics work better at lower quantities, so you can use less of them,” Townsend said.

The sugars have also been shown to prevent the build-up of bacterial biofilms, such as the plaques that build up on teeth. Indeed, the potential applications for these sugars go far beyond human health and may even be useful in the shipping industry.

“What’s the biggest problem in the shipping industry?” Townsend said. “Well, a huge problem is drag—things get stuck to the boats and make them go slow. Why do things get stuck? It’s because of biofilms of bacteria. Well, what kind of anti-biofilm compounds do we have? Oh yeah, we just discovered that there’s one in breast milk.”

But aside from solving this diverse array of adult problems, can this research support better formula milk for infants?

“They’re already adding these sugars in formula to try to recreate that breast milk microbiome,” Townsend said. “The shortcoming is that babies will eat 20 grams of these molecules per day when they’re breastfeeding. But if you go and buy [formula], you’re only getting around 100 milligrams. So, although people are trying to manipulate the microbiome with these sugars, we don’t have the scale to actually mimic what mom can do.”

As a chemist, Townsend hopes to develop enzymes and engineered microbes that can synthetically produce these sugars at a mass scale. But even then, we will be nowhere near to mimicking the complexity of human breast milk.

“Breast milk is highly personalized, and the quantity and quality of molecules changes every day,” Townsend said. “There’s no way we can predict it. There’s a feedback mechanism between mom and baby so that mom knows exactly what her baby needs from the milk. It’s crazy. And based on what the baby needs, moms spend about 500 extra calories a day personalizing their milk. We could never duplicate that. And, at this point, we can only really, at a high level, produce three, maybe four, of these milk oligosaccharide, out of 200.”

Townsend hopes to expand the uses of these compounds to help people with various illnesses, particularly those that target the stomach.

“I think people who have Crohn’s disease, IBS, celiac disease, and things that make you sick in the stomach are the next target [for these sugars],” he said. “The end product for us really is just a proof of principle, showing that we can do something very complex with very simple tools that have existed in plain sight. There are liters of this stuff everywhere, and I think that’s amazing.”

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