Alpha-lactalbumin as a breast cancer treatment?

While researching alpha-lactalbumin for my lab paper, I came across some really interesting news about it. For some background, alpha-lactalbumin is found in the breast milk of many animals. It is produced in the mammary gland and forms one part of the heterodimer, lactose synthase. Lactose synthase is an enzyme that joins galactose and glucose to form lactose. Furthermore, it has been found that alpha-lactalbumin is only present during lactation in healthy women. Recently, however, it has been found to be present in women with breast cancer. In 2010, Vincent Tuohy of the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute developed a vaccine that targets alpha-lactalbumin production in order to arrest the development of breast cancer tumors. They tested the vaccine on mice and were able to successfully prevent tumor formation and were also able to treat tumors that had already begun growing. This is super cool because this vaccine does not damage healthy breast tissue and is relatively painless for the patient! This would be very useful for women who are carriers of mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes or for women over the age of 40, when a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer begins to increase. So far this vaccine has only been tested on mice, or that’s all I’ve been able to find on the internet about how far they’ve gone, but they had great results with the mice so I think it’s a vaccine worth keeping an eye on!