Rivalling Nature's Whole-Milk Human Breast Milk

"I told anyone who would talk to me about BIOMILQ that I was doing this for mothers and babies."

"Informed by my personal experience with breastfeeding failure and by a relentless hunch about the biology of milk biosynthesis, I believed that if someone would just give me a chance to do this thing, it might actually work."

"Our unit economics are better than most of those in the cultivated meat space and our scale-up is more achievable, as we're not trying to constantly regrow cells."

"Some of the cells we've looked at can produce milk for months and months."

Leila Strickland, biologist, co-founder, CSO, BIOMILQ

"Were probably about a year from a whole human milk product that could go into market, but we have a heck of a lot of regulatory work ahead of us before that point."

"Is this an infant nutrition product, is this a milk product? It's an interesting and challenging question that I don't think we have a perfect answer for [it] yet."

Michelle Egger, co-founder, CEO, BIOMILQ

In a world’s first, BIOMILQ has made human breast milk by culturing mammary cells in a lab. Photo by Getty Images

The World Health Organization recommendation is that parents feed babies exclusively breast milk until they reach six months of age. And even then, to continue to incorporate breast milk feeding into their diets until infanthood, at least two years of age. The reason is biologically sound; human breast milk was designed by nature as the primal feeding method for human babies, for nutrition needs to be met, for a bond between mother and child to take its due course, and to ensure that babies gain the immunity qualities that breast milk confers.

Now, a biotech startup out of North Carolina divulged it has succeeded in copying nature in producing a formula to produce human breast milk in the laboratory through the culturing of mammary cells. The goal of the new startup, BIOMILQ, is to give nursing mothers an alternative to the use of baby formula. Either to augment nursing, or to replace it altogether, eschewing formula produced with cow's milk for the laboratory-produced breast milk endowed with the characteristics of naturally-produced breast milk.

Countless studies attest to the health benefits of beast milk. Formula milk, on the other hand, is acknowledged for its convenience and flexibility. According to Health Canada, 89 percent of babies are now breastfed, with over half of nursing mothers remaining with breastfeeding beyond the recommended six-month period. Those mothers who graduate from breast milk to formula milk cite their inability to produce enough milk, or that they're experiencing technique problems.

Benejam/ShutterStock

In these circumstances, mothers look to formula feeding to help fill the gap. The global market for formula is expected to reach $133 billion by 2026. Lacking the complexity and immunity features of breast milk, with production resting on cow's milk (and often palm oil), the formulation contributes to a rising carbon and water footprint.

Cell-cultured BIOMILQ, imitation human breast milk, presents itself as a nourishing alternative to formula, and the bonus presents less of an impact environmentally. The macronutrients in BIOMILQ's formula includes proteins, complex carbohydrates, fatty acids and allied bioactive lipids, all of which are a close match to those present in breast milk, boasting the convenient usefulness of formula-feeding.

Bioreactor  Wikipedia Commons

On their website BIOMILQ streses their product introduces "a whole milk product that maintains the integrity of its incredible evolutionary origin". The cell-cultured milk, produced in a laboratory, not through the biological process that produces human breast milk, is not bioidentical to breast milk."We're not confident it can be. Hormonal changes, baby's cues, skin-to-skin contact and environment all affect the dynamic complexity of breast milk", points out Leila Strickland.

BIOMILQ will still "support immune development, microbiome population, intestinal maturation and brain development in ways that bovine-based infant formula fundamentally cannot", the company founders state, despite the human milk produced by BIOMILQ, lacking antibodies.

BIOMILQ departs in its production focus from other companies in the same field focusing on the creation of components such as in the use of fermentation to make human milk oligosaccharides to produce their whole-milk product.