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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

BIOMILQ

Next Up for Cellular Agriculture: Scalability, Accessibility

At one point in the not-too-distant past, the idea of edible protein grown in a lab was the stuff of science fiction. But in what’s felt like a relatively short period of time (a few years), a greater number of companies, individuals, and investors have embraced the concept of cellular agriculture and, more and more, consider it a vital part of our future food system. 

Now the cell-based protein sector has a new set of challenges to tackle. As HigherSteaks’ Benjamina Bollag and BIOMILQ’s Michelle Egger discussed this week during The Spoon’s Food Tech Live event, we’re past the days of trying to convince folks that cellular agriculture is a viable reality. Now, companies have to prove the idea of growing protein in a lab can work at scale outside that lab to feed a growing world population, and do so while keeping environmental degradation minimal.

It’s not exactly a simple feat (understatement), and it certainly won’t happen next week (or next year). But during this week’s Food Tech Live, Bollag and Egger pinpointed not just the areas cellular agriculture needs to focus on in order to continue its evolution towards the mainstream, but also ideas for how to get there.

Among those are safety and quality assurance, equipment design, supply chain logistics, and cell culture density, to name just a few things. Egger added that one of the challenges cellular agriculture companies face right now is they are relying on technology from industries (biotech, Pharma) that have never had to scale to the level of mass commodity, which essentially the holy grail for cell ag companies.

Perhaps the biggest — and most important — challenge for these companies will be making cell-cultured protein, whether meat, breast milk, cheese, or eggs, into the hands of many. In other words, how do we make it more accessible to everyone?

It’s a question that isn’t possible to answer in the span of a 30-minute online chat, but definitely one the industry as a whole should consider now, though we’re years away from reaching that stage of mass commodity. Right now, a select few consumers can get their hands on alternative proteins grown in a lab. Those are usually the folks invited to exclusive taste-testings or the ones that can afford the rare fine dining experience for cultured protein.

“We can’t lose sight of the fact that if you truly want to reduce the amount of environmental degradation or provide more options to people or subsidize diets in a healthier manner, you have to get into the hands of everyone throughout this world,” said Egger.

That in turn will require more strategic thinking on the part of the industry in terms of how to reach a wider audience. It will also require collaboration amongst the difference companies currently innovating across the cellular agriculture sector.

Biomilq to Use Biopsies to Create Customized Cultured Breastmilk

One of the more intriguing applications for cell cultured food is human breastmilk. Breastfeeding doesn’t come easy for every mother for a variety of biological, societal and economic reasons, so the ability to give a child replicated human breastmilk rather than formula derived from cow’s milk could provide more optimal nutrition for growing babies.

One company working on cultured breastmilk is Biomilq, which earlier this year announced that it had successfully produced human casein and lactose, the predominant components found in breastmilk.

A story from The Guardian last week not only provided an in-depth primer on cultured breastmilk, but also talked about some of the specific technology that Biomilq is using. From that story:

Biomilq’s initial plan is as eye-catching as the product itself: they are going to produce customised breast milk for early adopters, grown from the customer’s own cells. “Moms would go through a fine needle biopsy procedure during their pregnancy,” Strickland explains. “That cell sample would be sent to us so we could start growing it up and producing milk. And then when she’s ready, we can start shipping it to her.”

This type of customization certainly sounds next-level in terms of cell cultured food. You aren’t just getting generic breastmilk from a lab, you’re getting specific breastmilk tailored to you for your baby.

While that is kind of mindblowing, as Biomilq admits to The Guardian, this customization will be very expensive at first. It also has the potential to reinforce inequalities where only those who can afford it will receive any potential advantages from this breakthrough technology. But Biomilq also points out this type of customized breastmilk is less a go-to market business model and more of a way to demonstrate the benefits of its product.

Wresting over ethical issues around cultured human breastmilk is not something we’ll have to deal with in the near term, however. Before we even get to the new set of ethical issues around cultured breastmilk, there are still many regulatory hurdles to overcome before it becomes something available for purchase.

BIOMILQ Raises $3.5M for its Cultured Human Breastmilk

BIOMILQ, which creates cultured human breastmilk in a lab, announced today that it has raised $3.5 million in funding. The round was led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures with participation from Shazi Visram, founder of Happy Family Brands and healthynest.

We’ve covered BIOMILQ before, writing about the company:

The startup was founded last year by Michelle Egger, a food scientist who previously worked in dairy R&D at General Mills, and Dr. Leila Strickland, a cell biologist who first conceptualized the technology in 2013 while breastfeeding her own daughter. The two met in the Research Triangle and created a patent-pending technology in which they trigger human mammary gland cells, kept alive by a constant stream of nutrients, to lactate. They then collect the resulting breastmilk.

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, “Breast milk is uniquely suited to the human infant’s nutritional needs and is a live substance with unparalleled immunological and anti-inflammatory properties that protect against a host of illnesses and diseases for both mothers and children.1”

However, breastfeeding isn’t always possible for number of reasons including low milk production, medical challenges, or the ongoing stigmas attached to breastfeeding/pumping in public or work places. BIOMILQ hopes its cultured breastmilk can serve as a healthier and more environmentally friendly option to dairy-based formulas.

BIOMILQ isn’t the only company looking to recreate breastmilk in the lab. Over in Singapore, TurtleTree Labs uses mammary gland cells in a nutrient rich bath to lactate milk. BIOMILQ told The Spoon previously that its technology does not require the nutrient bath and is a “much cleaner technology.”

The company is still very early on and a concept as new as cultured human breastmilk will undoubtedly face scrutiny from regulators, so there is a lot of work yet to be done. BIOMILQ said it will use its new funding to work on production, hire out its team and engage with key stakeholders including families, pediatricians and the breastfeeding community.

BIOMILQ Has Grown The Main Components of Human Breastmilk in a Lab

A new startup called BIOMILQ today announced that it had successfully produced human casein and lactose, the predominant components found in breastmilk, through their new patent-pending process. In short, they’ve grown the key elements of human breastmilk in a lab.

The startup was founded last year by Michelle Egger, a food scientist who previously worked in dairy R&D at General Mills, and Dr. Leila Strickland, a cell biologist who first conceptualized the technology in 2013 while breastfeeding her own daughter. The two met in the Research Triangle and created a patent-pending technology in which they trigger human mammary gland cells, kept alive by a constant stream of nutrients, to lactate. They then collect the resulting breastmilk.

Then again, the term “breastmilk” may not be strictly accurate. “We’re not calling it breastmilk just yet,” said Egger, explaining that a woman’s breastmilk contains much more than just lactose and casein alone. However, they’re confident that their samples are “quite similar to milk.” The startup’s cultured milk samples are currently readying to go through a detailed molecular characterization to affirm that they have the same nutritional profile as breastmilk.

I never thought I’d type this sentence, but BIOMILQ isn’t the only company working to growing human breastmilk in a lab. TurtleTree Labs, based in Singapore, uses lactating mammary gland cells (from humans or other animals) placed in nutrient-rich baths to encourage them to excrete milk. They then filter out the milk and distill it for a final product. However, Egger claims that BIOMILQ’s process is different from TurtleTree’s in that they don’t need to filter the end result — the mammary gland cells just secrete milk directly, no media bath needed. “It’s a much cleaner technology,” she said.

BIOMILQ has stated that as far as they knew, they were the first company to create the components of human breastmilk outside of a lactating woman. However, when I reached out to TurtleTree their CTO Max Rye said they had created human breastmilk in Q3 of 2019 and had been optimizing it ever since. So it seems fair to say that there are at least two players making strides in the space.

That’s not the only difference between the two companies. BIOMILQ is targeting Western markets, while TurtleTree will likely debut in Asia. BIOMILQ will likely enter the market selling its own product to consumers either through D2C models or through retail channels, while TurtleTree plans to license out its tech to large dairy companies.

TurtleTree has also disclosed a timeline: they plan to enter the market in two years. BIOMILQ, on the other hand, has stayed mum on the question of when they’ll begin selling.

One part of that hesitation is likely due to regulatory issues. The USDA and the FDA are jointly regulating cell-based meat, but BIOMILQ’s technology is unique — it’s not cells grown in a lab, but rather cells produced by cells kept alive in a lab setting through a precise calibration of environment and nutrition. Therefore it’s unclear how regulators will categorize their product.

Egger didn’t release hard numbers around BIOMILQ’s pricing, but did reveal that it would likely cost slightly more than top-end infant formula by the time of their full-scale launch.

Lab-grown breastmilk may be a ways away, but cultivated dairy is not. Perfect Day and New Culture are already creating animal-free dairy by fermenting genetically engineered microbes. Unlike BIOMILQ, which cultivates milk excreted from a lactating cell, both of the aforementioned companies rely on fermentation to create the various components of dairy, which they then combine with water and fat to create milk. Egger claims that their method was more efficient since it can produce all of the elements of milk in a single cell.

All of these companies could potentially have a big impact on the dairy industry. Perfect Day and New Culture are developing an entirely animal-free way to create milk, while BIOMILQ could theoretically replace dairy-based infant formula.

Though they might want to replace formula, Egger and Strickland were clear that they don’t want to replace breastfeeding altogether. “We’re not positioning ourselves to be equivalent to breastfeeding, because we know that immunologically there are some things we won’t be able to do,” Egger told me. Instead, she framed their product as a “supplemental nutrition aid.”

That could especially come in handy in low- and middle-income countries. BIOMILQ plans to eventually use its technology to provide reliable, cost-efficient breastmilk to areas were infants might struggle to get access to good nutrition.

The startup is still in very early stages with no significant funding, so we don’t even know if BIOMILQ will be able to follow through on their plan to commercialize their cultured (cell-based? cultivated?) breastmilk. But considering I hadn’t heard of lab-grown breast milk until a few months ago, and now there are two new companies making it, I think it’s safe to assume that the infant formula space has a shake-up coming its way.