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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

breast milk

TurtleTree Debuts Animal-Free Lactoferrin

TurtleTree, a biotechnology startup using precision fermentation to create bioactive ingredients such as animal-free milk proteins, has announced it will debut its precision-fermentation derived lactoferrin, which has the commercial name of LF+, tonight at a tasting event in San Francisco.

The bioactive milk protein, which the company says is nicknamed “pink gold” due to its high-cost and pink hue, is much sought after for its health benefits, including immunity, iron regulation, and digestive health support. However, conventional extraction techniques require massive amounts of cow’s milk – up to 10,000 liters, the equivalent of a week’s worth of milk production from nearly 50 cows – to obtain just 1 kilogram of purified lactoferrin. Because of this, traditionally derived lactoferrin costs anywhere between $700 to $1,500 per kilogram, which has been a gating factor in the broader adoption of this valuable protein.

By using precision fermentation, which uses microbes embedded with lactoferrin’s recipe to produce the protein, TurtleTree hopes to offer a more affordable and sustainably-derived form of lactoferrin to the market in LF+. If they are successful, the company may be one of the first startups launched in recent years to target proteins for infants (and beyond) using cellular agriculture to bring a scaled, revenue-generating product line to market. More broadly, the company may have also engineered an approach to make lactoferrin more widely available to consumers through a variety of products.

The move towards precision fermentation to produce functional proteins is a sign the company has evolved since it was founded in 2019. When The Spoon first interviewed the company, they focused primarily on using cell-cultivation methods to produce breast milk analogs. According to CTO Max Rye at the time, the company was using cell-cultivation techniques to grow mammary gland cells in a lab that would lactate milk. Company CEO Fengru Lin speculated early on that their first product would be human breast milk.

Fast forward to 2023, and the company has become more diversified in its approach to utilizing cellular agriculture techniques after bringing on some key hires skilled in the application of precision fermentation, a move that looks to have accelerated its path toward revenue with the commercialization of its animal-free lactoferrin. The company hopes to launch LF+ in the fourth quarter of this year.

You can watch the TurtleTree hero reel on their new product below:

Unlocking The Future of Nutrition with LF+, TurtleTree’s Unique Lactoferrin

BIOMILQ Raises $21M in Series A Funding With Focus on Mission-Aligned Partners

In June, The Spoon reported on North Carolina-based startup BIOMILQ’s success in recreating human milk outside of the breast. The company is working toward manufacturing cell-cultured milk at commercial scale, hoping to provide parents who cannot breastfeed regularly with a nutritionally equivalent option.

BIOMILQ announced today that they’ve closed their Series A financing round with $21 million. This week, The Spoon got on Zoom with company co-founder and CEO Michelle Egger to discuss the funding round and BIOMILQ’s next steps toward commercialization.

“In the grand scheme of fundraising rounds in cellular agriculture, $21 million is par for the course,” says Egger. “But we’re particularly proud because we’re an all-female leadership team. It’s less about celebrating the dollar value and more about celebrating the fact that we were able to raise it with specific partnership criteria that helped us find mission-aligned partners.”

During the round, BIOMILQ focused on identifying funds that employed female partners; that had company portfolios in which at least 10% of founders came from diverse or non-traditional backgrounds; and that had mandates on nutrition, health, or sustainability in their investment criteria.

Egger says that those criteria narrowed the field of potential investors, but ultimately helped the team to connect with partners “that are furthering new ideas and new innovation from areas where we otherwise wouldn’t see it.” Those partners include Novo Holdings, Gaingels, Spero, and Digitalis.

This round of funding will help BIOMILQ to bring its production processes to scale. Currently, the company produces small sample quantities of cell-cultured milk—just enough for compositional and optimization testing, according to Egger. They’re currently building a pilot plant in North Carolina, where they hope to begin producing milk in the quantities required for safety testing before launching the product.

In grappling with the challenge of building up scale, BIOMILQ is in the same boat as cell-cultured meat startups. But Egger says that the process for, and challenges of, producing cell-cultured milk are unique.

“Our product isn’t cells; our product is what the cells produce,” she says. “In cellular agriculture, they’re growing meat to replace the way cattle farmers have traditionally raised bovine cattle to slaughter. We’re more like milkmaids, raising cells to act more like dairy cows, where they’re able to produce milk—in this case, human milk.”

In contrast to cellular agriculture, BIOMILQ’s process is more similar to pharmaceutical production than fermentation production in terms of scale and price.

There are some advantages that come with playing the role of cellular milkmaid. For instance, BIOMILQ doesn’t need its cells to grow explosively, but to secrete milk—so the company’s process requires relatively small quantities of expensive growth factors.

BIOMILQ also stands out from the crowd of cell cultivation startups because the company uses human epithelial cells to produce its milk. The use of human cells comes with its own challenges, as the company has had to prove to the FDA’s Institutional Review Boards that donors consented fully to the use of their cells. “In the past, human research hasn’t always been upfront about how cells were being utilized,” says Egger. “So it’s top-of-mind for us, as the first food product created from human cells.”

The regulatory pathway for BIOMILQ remains unclear, although the company is actively working with regulators.

Egger says that the company “might be a bit quieter” over the next year or two, as the team works on building up scale and undergoing safety testing. Still, she’s excited about these next steps.

“We get to pioneer a new future of nutrition and push forward technologies that have never been applied in this way,” says Egger, “which is very exciting. And it’s also a huge challenge that we take very seriously, because at the end of the day, the product we’re making isn’t a novel hamburger or a novel chicken nugget—it’s nutrition that supports the life of human beings on our planet.”

Image credit: BIOMILQ

Cell-Based Breastmilk Startup TurtleTree Eyes Lactoferrin as First Commercial Product

TurtleTree, a startup developing human breastmilk using cellular agriculture technology, has announced that its first commercially available product will be lactoferrin, a protein found in both animal and cow milk.

Lactoferrin has long been viewed as a critical protein to both fight infection and to aid in brain development of young children, as well as a supplement to help women fight iron deficiencies, has more recently gained traction for its ability to help fight against COVID-19 infection.

While today’s supplement industry uses cow-derived lactoferrin, human breastmilk has 5-7 times the concentration. TurtleTree saw an opportunity.

“We have been able to identify early commercial ingredient targets due to our frequent conversations with prominent performance nutrition and infant formula companies,” said Max Rye, Chief Strategist of TurtleTree. “We’ve since seen tremendous interest from global partners in our portfolio of human and bovine milk products. It is going to be an exciting year for us.”

TurtleTree focus on lactoferrin as it’s first product for scaled commercial production doesn’t mean it’s giving up on creating fully realized cell-based breastmilk. The company is still working on its technology that grows mammary gland cells in a lab which actually lactate milk, but recognizes it could take a few years before cell-based milk can scale and has full regulatory approval.

TurtleTree isn’t the only cell-based breastmilk startup to make the news lately. Earlier this week BioMILQ announced that it has successfully made human breast milk outside the breast. Another, Israel-based BioMilk, is looking to create both human and cow milk analogs and recently became publicly listed on Tel Aviv stock exchange despite being few years out still from commercially scaled production.

TurtleTree Labs Raises $3.2M Seed Round for its Cultured Human Breast Milk

Turtle Tree Labs, a Singapore-based startup that creates milk from mammalian cells, announced yesterday that it has raised a $3.2 million seed round of funding. Green Monday Ventures, KBW Ventures, CPT Capital, Artesian, and New Luna Ventures all participated in the round.

As we’ve covered previously, TurtleTree Labs uses cellular agriculture to grow mammary gland cells in a nutrient rich bath that actually lactate milk. This company is initially focusing on re-creating human breast milk, and will follow that up with cow milk. Because they are creating milk in the lab, scientists can alter the milk to give it different attributes like higher or lower fat or cholesterol.

When we spoke to TurtleTree at the end of 2019, the company had plans to debut its first glass of human breast milk in Q1 of 2021 and enter the market at the end of 2021. We don’t know if the COVID-19 pandemic has altered any of those plans, but in its funding announcement, TurtleTree said that the Singapore government has been supportive, allowing the company to continue its work apace.

Cultured breast milk seems to be a pretty hot space right now. TurtleTree’s funding comes just a week after BIOMILQ raised $3.5 million for its cultured breast milk solution.

It’s not hard to understand why cultured human breast milk is attracting funding. It has the potential to provide a healthier and more environmentally friendly option for women who are unable to produce enough breast milk on their own because of biological or environmental reasons.

That is still years away, however, as companies like TurtleTree need to continue development of its product and scale up to make its milk more affordable. This new round of funding will definitely help that.

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.