The Future of Baby Formula May Be Artificial Breast Milk
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Hey, future of everything listeners. This episode is all about the science behind artificial breast milk. We're excited to share IT with you, give IT a listen and let us know what you think. Send a note to F O V podcast A W S J dot com. Thanks for listening on to the show.

Megan corkran is a mom of two living in carmo, l. New york, about fifty miles north of new ork city. My oldest is five. And when was your Youngest born?

SHE was born April. Toy force.

Oh, wow. So SHE is so Young.

Yeah, she's a baby, baby.

Even before he gave birth to her first daughter, hai corcoran says he had gotten the message loud and clear. The best way to feed her baby was to breast feed. And things initially went pretty smoothly after cork went home from the hospital and settled into life with the newborn. Though IT surprised her how much work .

rest feeding was. My experience, I felt like a very, so I really kind of like new, and I attached like my pumped machine. But that's all I would do as I, they have a baby on me or I D on the machine pumping. And that was released dressed when .

corker went back to work.

After three months, they started to miss feeding times, which made her body produce less milk. So even though he had wanted to breast feed her daughter for a year, he found that he simply couldn't. Breast feeding can be time consuming. According to the centres for disease control and prevention, a baby will breast feed about eight to twelve times in twenty four hours during the first months of life, and each feeding can last as long as forty five minutes.

I gave a formal, and I am vergers crying and being so distraught about that corner.

Breast feeding experience is pretty common. According to the cdc, eighty three percent of children in the U. S.

Are breast fed at some point. But at the one year mark, the recommended breast feeding duration per the U. S. Dietary guidelines, the percentage babies being breast fed dropped to thirty eight percent. And so many parents turn to formula, which fun fact often includes proteins from cavs milk.

Today's formulas have vitamins, minerals, fats and proteins, some of which are similar to those in human breast smile, but it's still not quite the same as breast milk. Long term health studies have found that formulas said babies are more likely to develop health conditions such as asma, obesity and even sudden infant death syndrome, or s. What if there was a product out there that was closer to human breast milk and imparted some of the same health benefits to babies? IT was available like formula.

if my PH tion was like. Now we've in our research, we've seen that their results here like this is really good. I would certainly try IT.

From the wall street journal, this is the future of everything. I'm alexo la. Today will hear about three startups working to create products that more closely resemble human rest milk. If they succeed, they could transform how we feed babies in the future.

Stay with us.

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On a recent fall morning, I visited one of the biotech companies working on the future of nutrition. Hi yeah, you. So get, i'll make these for the offices of hAlina.

A started working on making a component of human breast milk in the lab. Laura cats is its stander and C E. O.

So what we do at hAlina is we make bioactive human proteins. So proteins natively found in breast milk, but they're actually found through .

out the human body. Protein is just one component of breast milk, which is surprisingly complex. Bd goods is an engineering professor, a dark with college, and studies the components of breast milk.

Breast milk is for super complicated mixture of things. IT has a ton of different components in IT. So it's sort of the components that you would Normally think of like proteins, beams, minerals, lids, all of those fats, like those things that we need for growth.

But goods says breast bill contains more than nutrition. It's got other elements key to a babies developing immune system such as bioactive ves A N SHE says breast milk is changing all the time. Factories like what a rest speeding parent eats can change its composition, and it's responded to a baby's health and nutritional needs.

Press milk is actually more of a living fluid than a sort of static fluid. We know that breast milk can vary in terms of composition over the course of the day. The sum of our work has shown that this can vary even over the course of years because .

of this complexity, most startups working on artificial breast milk aren't trying to make products exactly like human breast milk, at least not immediately. Most, including Helena, are just looking to replicate a part of IT Helena Laura cats. Again.

I don't believe we'll be able to capture everything in breast milk, hopefully in our lifetime, but probably not. The scientific community doesn't know all of the things in there. In its dynamic.

C cats founded HEllen in twenty thousand, and the company has received more than thirty five million dollars in investment to date. The first protein mates working on is called lactose eron.

So the first protein that we're making, lactose eron, is a fascinating protein. I like to say it's the most studied food ingredient you've never heard of lack.

Heron is found in our bodies. It's also in breast milk. In babies, the protein has been associated with fewer infections and helping the development of their growing digestive systems. There are a number of clinical trials currently in the works that are assessing latter hiring as an intervention for conditions ranging from covered nineteen and adults. Tuna sub drama engineering professor brick goods says yes, like fire is a key component in breast milk, though he knows that infant growth and nutrition are so complex that it's hard to say whether any one factor can be attributed to improve outcomes .

or long term health.

There are already products containing both electro on on the market. But according to the company, what to linea apart is that they're making a human form of the protein. They're doing IT through a process called precision fermentation.

Basically, IT involves genetically engineering microorganism, in this case based to produce a specific substance. Cats under colleague, chief technology officer Anthony y. Clark, gave me a tour of the lab to see how IT all works. Step one, genetically engineer the east.

So what we do at Helena is we grab east, which you can use to make alcohol in beer, you can use to make bread, but we're teaching you how to make proteins and the proteins that a east is natively going to produce when we fermented, or east proteins, which are great, but not what we're interested in. So what we tell the east to do is make something human.

After selecting only the best, most efficient strains of modified east. It's aren't step to make the east spit out the desired protein. So we have .

these big fermentation tanks. We throw the east, and there we throw all of the food that IT. It's called media.

And IT grows. IT starts to spend the protein. Now the .

fermentation tank, sort of look like a little blender, is running really fast. IT takes a week for the eastern side to do its thing.

And after a few days of making this protein, we purify IT using filters and different things to kind of, I think about IT is like separating your speakee I from the water. That's really kind of what these filters look like just at a very small scale. And then we have this really pure protein.

The pure protein is radish pink and color the same dusty rose or milenio pink echoed in the accents around holiness office. With that in hand is on to step three, putting the protein in stuff so I can be consumed. Cat LED me to a room where a big spray dryer was turning the lactose er and .

protein into a powder r like milk, probably right, a little sweet. yeah.

Cats opened in nearby refrigerator stock with new products in development. There were a few jar ars of pink gumming and some clear plastic bottles caught my eye. They were filled with White and ground liquids labelled omen milk and coconut milk and chocolate. Honestly, they looked pretty tempting, like a shake I might pick up from my corner store, and maybe at some point I could. Helena currently has a clinical study underway assessing the effective lack of fairing on the immune function of healthy adults.

And we have them drinking a drink mix. And it's our lack of affair in mixed ed with several different things to make a mix, kind of like a Crystal light package. So you pour IT in IT dissolves in water.

why adults are not babies cat says the infant nutrition product is gna take a while longer. Of course.

the company was started with a vision in the mission to bridge the gap between sa formula. But we've realized in growing the business and making this protein the impact you can have from early life to end of life nutrition. So we are taking that in using IT and drink mixes and gummy and kinds of things where we think we could have a really important impact on human health.

Other startups are figuring out different ways to make components of breast milk. They're using techniques that have never been done before, and some are relying on actual human cells to produce the milk in the lab more after the break.

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When lyas stricklin had her first child in two thousand and nine, SHE came to a realization similar to make corkran the mom of two we met earlier. Breast feed can be difficult.

My background and training is in cell biology, and I was nearing the end of my post doc fellowship when I became a mother and discovered how chAllenging the experience of trying to best feed a child can be. Um was pretty unprepared for those kinds of chAllenges .

to Better understand why, by her description, her body wasn't doing IT well. Strictly started to dig into the research .

around lactation and found that the field had not been adequately studied, but that there was a lot of reason to think that you could model a process of lactation outside the body. And if you could do that, that that would maybe make a product that you could feed to babies that would be more similar to breast milk than the infant formula, is that I was finding myself needing to turn to in order to support my own child's growth.

In twenty twenty, SHE co founded bio milk, a company intending to create a product more similar to human breast milk, is raised about twenty five million dollars to date. Its investors include breakthrough energy ventures, which was founded by bill gates. But making that product takes a lot of time and work early on, strict learned that memory cells don't always work the same outside the body.

I ve had my mind blown by breast milk cover the last three behalf for four years. IT is mind boggling ly complex.

To make bio milks product.

we just call IT sell cultured human milk.

The company first built up a bank of memory cells.

and these cells all come from vacating women who donated samples of breast milk, contains a lot of cells that you can then culture out. And so we built a cell bank with memory cells from women of all backgrounds and all stages of lactation. And then we started working through those cells to see what are they capable, love.

what can they do? The bank cells are frozen until they're ready to be used. After scientists of the cells, they allow them to multiply and then place those cells in a bioreactor. Three, the environment, in a lab that has everything those cells need to grow, bio milk cells grow on the surface where they form what's called epithelial tissue.

Epithetic cells create a lining, a barrier really between compartments in the body. That's what we're after in our system as well, is for these memory cells to sit down on this surface, attach to each other, attach to the thing they are growing on, and then form this lining.

In the bioreactor, there are long, skinny tubes, almost like draws. The inside of each draw is filled with sale media, the stuff that feeds the cells on the outside of the straw are the cells themselves. The milk product the cells secrete ends up circulating in the bioreactor and is extracted with a serene, strickland says the whole process from buying the sample to final product takes about thirty days. What exactly is in the final product and when might IT come to market? Strickland can't say yet.

Yeah, I would say it's in a very early stage of development. I have a lot of work to do to really hone in on what is that specification of molecules that we are making consistently every single time. I would hope we would have at least the beginnings of pipeline heading into market well before twenty thirty.

Israel based start up wilk is also working on cell cultured infant nutrition. Evita back is its C, E, O.

What we are doing. And that's why it's super hard and it's deep science. We're taking a manage tissue from women, and we are culturing them in the lab. And we are actually bio king of the same physiological process that is happening. This is the same technology as the .

human body wilk has honed in on replicating the fats founded human breast milk. Earlier this year, week closed round of funding with two million dollars from french food company dann. It's hoping to put a product on the market in twenty twenty seven, but there's a lot of work to do before then.

We are getting very good results, and we're growing. The main chAllenge is the upscale. So we do know how to develop a fat in the lab now. How do you upscale IT and how do you upscale IT IT in a way that would be financially available.

To be clear, these startups say they are not looking to replace breast milk. They say they're looking to get parents a potentially Better alternative to formula if they decide to stop rest feeding. But before anything can hit the market in the U.

S, it'll need to meet the rules set by the food and drug administration. Of course, there are frameworks for existing infant formulas, but products from HEllena, bio milk and wilk many different ones. Gen says the regulations for bio milk cell cultured milk don't yet.

An fdi spokesperson said that the agency is ready to work with firms to support innovation in human foods and encourages firms to have conversations with them often and early in their product and process development. Face both hollas law cats and bio milk. Lila strickland say they intend to rigorously assess the safety of their products as well as their long term health effects. Cat says he plans to run many clinically trials in the future.

We are building this company on a lot of integrity. We don't want to say something about this protein that we can back up with real science. And if we want to have an impact on different types of populations, children, infants, elderly, athletes, women, we need to do the studies to support that. And we can do the millet.

once strict, says biomes k is developing protocols to test its cell cultured on lab based models, animals and in healthy adults, all before IT tasses a baby's lips.

And so you really developing that safety profile first, and then you start going into trials in babies because you want to be able to really say, like, does this thing do the thing that we wanted to do? Does that actually work?

Both cats on strickland also say that it's important that their products be affordable enough to be within reach from many parents.

If we look at the market today for infant formula, there's one formula in the U. S. With lactose in the cosme clacton phone, and it's one of the most expensive in the country. Lack of hiring is incredibly important for infant nutrition, and we're not onna be able to get this protein or anything else into products without a cost that can match.

Actually, there are a few formulas out there that include lack of fair in these days and they can be pricy. While most popular powder infant formulas cost anywhere from fifty cents and outs to well over a dollar per outs depending on the store, informal inspire optimum, one of the formulas that contains like to fair cost over two dollars per ounce, though no artificial breast built products are available yet. Casey rose and carroll, the chief of breastfeeding and vital medicine at the university of rochester, told my parents are already starting to ask for them, but he said he be hesitant to recommend one until he saw long term studies about the health effects compared to formula and breast milk. Others are skeptical of the whole enterprise.

Thinking of breast milk only as a product that can be grown in labs is going to contribute equivalent benefits as proceeding is absolutely false as we speak. And I just don't think that at this in my lifetime that will ever happen.

That's profile. Paris is chema, a professor of public health at the yale school of public health earlier this year. Paris is chema coffered, a series of articles in the scientific journal the Lancet.

One of the biggest conclusions was that the marketing of infant formula got in the way of parents who might have otherwise breast fed pharmacy. Al company perrigo, which on its website says is the third largest formula maker in the U. S.

In canada, said via spokesman that IT is not working on artificial breast milk at this time. As for other big formula makers, abbott declined to comment. Amnesty did not respond to requests for comment.

So what does the future of infant nutrition look like? Getting to a product that can imitate the complexity of human breast milk is gonna come in step. That is, if it's possible, little, the first step to getting there may be adult nutrition. Holly is Laura cats says her company is working on those products now with the goal of putting something on the market next year. SHE plans to use that revenue to support the development of infant nutrition products.

Infant formula is something we're working on. IT just takes longer time to get to market because there's a few more tests you have to do. You have to run a clinically study in infants, and we are currently working on that. But we just can't get to market as quickly in infant as we can in these other in .

the next few years. Helena and bio milk plan to mic infant nutrition products that contain parts of human breast milk not currently found in formula.

And so what we believe the best way forward to move infant formula closer to breast milk is to make solutions that can be useful to the population as opposed to the individual, knowing that there's always going to be a personal piece of what your breast milk looks like.

Bionics laus strickland says he wants these infant nutrition products to feed into her larger goal, to create a product that gets even closer to the full complexity of human breast milk.

From a commercialization standpoint, we've had to kind of start to think about like OK, what are the product opportunities. And so what that has started to look like for us is almost a pipeline of products that we think will be, you know, not a complete food for your baby, but that will bring things into infant formula, early life nutrition products that you can't get anywhere else. And that's the business that will build to support the work towards this whole human new product.

if all goes well, he says he anticipates that her company's work will benefit baby's health in the long term and that new parents will be able to feel confident in making choices that are right for them.

I know how important if IT is when you're thinking about whether I going to feed my baby. Any parent should be able to go to their pediatrician an and say, what do you think of this? Is this okay? Like, is this a good idea? And we want the pediatrician to be able to look at the science and look at the evidence that we've generated and say, this looks amazing.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal. Stephanie l. Gerrit is the editor, tor of the future of everything. This episode was produced by me, alexo salla.

Our fact checker is a partners, Nathan Michael love and just a our sound designers and road or thy music cater nop is our supervising producer. I shut all muslim is our development producer Scott salary and Christianly are the deputy editor. And full on a patterson is the head of news audio for the wall street journal. Like the show, tell your friends and leave us a five star review on your favorite platform. Thanks for listening.

Amazon q business is the new generation A I assistant from A W S, because many tasks can make business slow, as if waiting through .

mud a help. Luckily.

there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can securely understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline task. Now you can summarize orderly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at A W S dot com flash. Learn more.