Lab-grown human breast milk may be on store shelves in a few years

Backed by Bill Gates, startup BIOMILQ is on a quest to get its lab-grown human breast milk product to market within five years.

A North Carolina startup called BIOMILQ may have whipped up a nutritionally comparable alternative to human breast milk — except this milk isn’t produced in a mammary gland, but in a bioreactor.

For parents who can’t breastfeed or who adopted or used surrogates, having another option for their children besides formula milk could be a game-changer. It’s also very common for women to not be able to produce enough breast milk on their own.

Co-founder and chief science officer of BIOMILQ, Leila Strickland, ran into her own issues with producing enough milk when she was a new mom in 2009.

“Because I was so unprepared for it, I found it really isolating. I felt like there was something wrong with me,” Strickland told The Guardian.

So when Strickland heard about the first lab-grown burger, developed in 2013, she set her sights on adapting that technology to culture milk-producing cells.

“Using the same techniques that we’ve used for decades to grow cells outside the body, we’re able to reproduce the behaviour these cells have evolved over millions of years, to produce components in quantities that match the baby’s needs,” Strickland said of her startup’s process.

The “women-owned, science-led and mother-centered” startup was founded in 2020 and has since garnered the attention of billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, who owns a US$3.5-million stake in the company.

Strickland told CNN that it will still take another three to five years before the first BIOMILQ product hits the market. In the meantime, the startup needs to scale up its production and lower costs, as well as convince regulators to clear its product for safe consumption.