A serendipitous discovery more than 25 years ago set Catharina Svanborg, an immunologist at Lund University in Sweden, on a rare path among biologists; she took a molecule all the way from its discovery to the bedside.
While looking for antibacterial molecules in natural sources like blood, tears, or human milk, Svanborg and her team tested the antibiotic properties in cancer cells because they multiply and are easier to handle than non-cancer cells. When they added a certain fraction of human milk, the cancer cells died.1
“We repeated the experiment again the next day, and they still died, so we thought, ‘Oh, this must be interesting,’” Svanborg recalled.
The molecule Svanborg and her team eventually identified in human milk, alpha-lactalbumin, holds a surprising property. Most proteins in the body must fold into a specific shape to carry out essential tasks such as digesting food and fighting off infections as antibodies. ...
