Artificial breast milk to take on dairy industry

Babies could soon be making an unwitting contribution to battling climate change, with the help of Bill Gates. The philanthropist and cofounder of Microsoft has poured millions of dollars into a start-up that hopes to develop artificial breast milk to reduce the carbon footprint of mothers who choose not to breastfeed.

Estimates suggest that at least 10 per cent of the world dairy market, a major source of greenhouse gases, is used to produce baby formula milk.

Biomilq, an American company, provided proof of a concept to show the feasibility of its plans in February. It hopes to produce breast milk artificially from cultured human mammary epithelial cells in about five years.

This would be an alternative to formula milk. The firm has already shown that the process can produce lactose and casein, two components of human breast milk.

Biomilq is being assisted by an investment of US$3.5 million (NZ$5.5m), mostly from a fund set up by Gates.

The notion of growing breast milk in a laboratory is likely to be less alien to the public after the popularity of lab grown meat. Many consumers choose to go vegetarian or ‘‘flexitarian’’, for health, moral or environmental reasons.

Meat-free beef from Impossible Foods has become a sensation in

America with its realistic taste. The product is created from soy leghemoglobin, made with genetically engineered yeast.

Biomilq was founded by Michelle Egger and Leila Strickland. Much like Impossible Foods, whose founder Patrick Brown was a professor of biochemistry, Egger was a food scientist, while Strickland was a cell biologist.

Breast feeding is widely touted for its health benefits for babies, but many mothers do not have that option. Formula milk is the normal alternative for these mothers. This can cause problems, however, for some youngsters’ digestive systems because it relies on cows’ milk or soy rather than human proteins.

Biomilq aims to create something that is as digestible as human breast milk but has a smaller environmental impact than dairy.

Strickland said that she struggled to breastfeed her son when he was born prematurely about 10 years ago. She felt beaten down by the notion that if breastfeeding did not come easily, she just had to try harder.

‘‘Being unable to do this really critical thing – that I hadn’t anticipated struggling with and that I knew was super important – really affected how I felt about myself as a woman and as a mother,’’ she told Business Insider, a US website.

This prompted Strickland to look for a solution to help other mothers in a similar situation.

Egger had been looking into better breast milk alternatives while working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She was researching ‘‘affordable plantbased protein sources for low-andmiddle-income countries’’.

The pair formed Biomilq last September. An investment fund set up by Bill Gates was the main provider of funding through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, set up by the Microsoft co-founder to focus on climate change.

Its board includes Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff. Other members are Sir Richard Branson, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and Jack Ma, of Alibaba. –