Man fights cancer with breast milk

Breakfast is quite unusual for Tim Browne. When the retired teacher and musician from Wiltshire, England, sits down to a bowl of corn flakes in the morning, he slurps up one unusual, and controversial, extra ingredient: his daughter's breast milk.

The unusual and extraordinary supplement helps Browne fight cancer that has spread to his liver and lymph nodes and is life-threatening, ABC News reported. Nearly two years ago, Browne was diagnosed with colon cancer. He went into surgery a week before his daughter's wedding, but a month later, doctors told him the cancer had spread to his liver and lymph nodes and was terminal.

Surgery was ruled out this time, so Browne began a course of chemotherapy. Desperate to help, his daughter Georgia came up with the idea while watching a show about breast milk.

"(It was) a man in America. It was prostate cancer this man had and he'd been drinking breast milk every day," she was quoted by ABC News as saying. "Anyway, this guy really swore by the breast milk and said that it had reduced his tumors."

Georgia is nursing her son Monty and offered to set aside a few ounces of milk every day for Browne.

"If I have a lactating daughter, why not take advantage of her? As long as Monty didn't mind," Browne said. He initially said his daughter Georgia's breast millk tasted "not unpleasant, but slightly pungent". A month after starting to share the milk with his grandson, scans show that Browne's cancer has improved. Scientists are cautiously optimistic about breast milk's potential.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, there have been "intriguing new developments (which) indicate that breast milk may ... reduce the risk of childhood cancer."

A protein in human milk can cause cancerous cells to "self-destruct", the FDA said on its website. That unique characteristic of the protein could potentially help battle cancer in adults, some doctors say. "There's promising research that would indicate that in the future the solution for not only preventing cancer, but even treating and curing cancer might be in human milk," said Dr Lori Feldman-Winter at Cooper University Hospital in New Jersey.