Scientists Given Grant to Probe Hidden Powers of Milk
A milk moustache may soon be a sign that life has been saved.
Pharmaceutical companies working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have discovered a single dose cure for malaria that works when taken with milk.
The foundation has now given a substantial grant to a team of Australian scientists at the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Bio-Nano Sciences under Ben Boyd to determine what it is about milk that makes the drug work.
Professor Boyd’s research area is drug delivery and his team has now discovered why milk works and is tackling the problem of whether something similar to milk can be used.
He said the single-dose tablet has the chance to save half a million lives in Africa and Asia every year but they can’t produce a drug that works only when someone drinks milk, which might not be available.
“This is the only option at this stage that’s on the table to have that sort of an impact and that’s why the Gates Foundation is going so full on with this project,” Professor Boyd said. “They came to us with this problem because its squarely in our area.”
He said the majority of drugs that are discovered today don’t become medicines because they are unable to dissolve in normal stomach contents, but this breakthrough with milk could have the ability to assist these other drugs.
“It’s no coincidence because nature has designed, depending on your theological perspective, milk to deliver our essential nutrients, to help our brain and bodies develop as infants,” he said.
“We need to overcome that hurdle of understanding why milk works so well and what are our options for using milk or milk-like variants.”
He said a solution using the team’s findings could also be used to improve AIDS medication and the delivery of antiretroviral drugs, as well as getting medications to people in low economic or nomadic settings where it can be hard to have people come for a single dose.
Professor Boyd said the problem with milk was its variability.
“Season to season and even cow to cow, the components that are in milk change and although that may not make much of a difference to natural performance, it can be a no-go point for the regulatory authorities,” he said.
The Australian scientists have been awarded a one-year grant and Professor Boyd said he thought that the team was making more progress than what was anticipated.
The next set of clinical trials are set for May.
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