In 2013, Dr Natalie Shenker and Dr James Flanagan started to work on a pilot project at Imperial College London, funded by Breast Cancer Now. The goal of the study was to work out whether cells found in samples of breast milk could be extracted and analysed for markers of cancer risk, so-called epigenetic signatures.
The study was a success. Over the next year, over 200 women donated milk through the Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital Milk Bank. What we found was that cells could be extracted, and that a majority of them were epithelial, meaning they were those cells that lined milk ducts, and were the ones we most wanted to work on to understand cancer risk. We published a paper about these cells here (with one of the images reproduced below), and are working on another that describes our methods in more detail, and some of the really interesting findings from this group of amazing women, right now.
There was some excitement about our findings back in 2015 - we presented the data at the American Association of Cancer Research, and rapidly set up a consortium of other scientists to help analyse such a complication fluid as milk from lots of different angles. The full BECS study was granted ethical approval to recruit 20,000 women at the end of 2015.
Then the study hit two hurdles - despite repeated applications for grant funding, no money was secured to continue the study. And the milk bank infrastructure in London, which was so critical to help recruit mothers into the study, effectively collapsed in early 2016. Over the last 3 years, Dr Natalie Shenker and Gillian Weaver have worked to establish a new model for milk banking in the UK - the Hearts Milk Bank. As part of the newly founded charity, the Human Milk Foundation, Hearts is now not only one of the largest milk banks in the country, but is also the recruitment centre for BECS as well as a host of other human milk-related research studies.
Shenker, N.S., Flower, K.J., Wilhelm-Benartzi, C.S. et al. Transcriptional implications of intragenic DNA methylation in the oestrogen receptor alpha gene in breast cancer cells and tissues. BMC Cancer 15, 337 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12885-015-1335-5