ABSTRACT:
There is no dispute that Human breast milk is the best possible food for an infant but the uses for breast milk go far beyond nutrition. Breast milk contains antibodies that help fight infections both internally and externally. And can be used topically as a treatment as well food for your baby. But in the acid environment of an infant’s stomach, the normal alfa-lactalbumin protein changed shape and transformed into a killer of cancer cells. The apoptosis inducing activity was in the casein fraction of human milk and was characterized as a multimeric form of human alfa-lactalbumin (MAL). MAL induced apoptosis in transformed and non-transformed cell lines. Using optical and NMR spectroscopy, it has shown that the apoptosis inducing variant has an altered fold relative to native alfa-lactalbumin and has a more loosely organized tertiary structure. The necessary conditions to convert native alfa-lactalbumin purified from human milk to the apoptosis-inducing form, which is called HAMLET (Human Alpha-lactalbumin Made Lethal to Tumor cells) is that it requires, the protein is first partially unfolded through the removal of the tightly bound calcium ion and then exposed to a specific fatty acid. HAMLET enters tumor cells (but not healthy cells), accumulates in their nuclei, and kills them by apoptosis as seen by confocal fluorescence microscopy and a characteristic DNA fragmentation pattern. From the results obtained by various studies it is clear that HAMLET shows great promise as a new therapeutic agent with the advantage of selectivity for tumor cells and lack of toxicity.