Needs & Benefits of a Mother’s Breast Milk - Opportunities for cellular biology production methods.

The importance of a mother’s breast milk cannot be understated - it is one of the most effective and impactful biologics passed intra-species. It transfers a form of machine learning that programs the infant’s immune function, memory and mental processing, cognitive development, gut biome, and overall health for a lifetime. This is because a mother’s breast milk contains thousands of molecular formulations, including vitamins, minerals, proteins, oligosaccharides, enzymes, growth factors, anti-parasites, anti-allergies, anti-viruses, hormones, and antibodies that trigger a healthy adaptive response in the infant.

Manufactured infant formula, typically powdered, is not mother’s milk. Rather, it is fortified cow milk that simply lacks the complex molecular formulation found in human lactation. It is unproven to trigger the type of biological process that supports an infant’s immunity, cognitive growth, and overall health. In addition, the cost to fortify the complex vitamin, minerals, proteins and oligosaccharides leaves powdered formula lacking key ingredients. 

Each year, vitamin A deficiency claims the lives of almost 670,000 children under 5 years of age and zinc deficiency claims more than 450,000. Furthermore, it is hard for a baby’s gut to absorb anything other than breastmilk in the first six months of life, and formula or other food can cause injuries to the gut which can take the baby weeks to recover from.

This is why the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends breastfeeding, exclusively, for the first 6 months of an infant's life and supplemented breastfeeding with food for up to 2 years or more. In other words, a mother’s milk is itself considered a supplement, no different than a vitamin. Breastfeeding is so important that the WHO sanctions that mothers who struggle with breastfeeding should first try a wet-nurse or milk bank and opt for breastmilk substitute formula only as a last resort. Wet-nurses and milk bank services are culturally familiar in many locations in the world, particularly in Asia, and represent a non-traditional economic industry of note.

Cultured Mother’s Milk (Lab-grown)

Imagine if scientists could extract and replicate female mammary cells responsible for lactation/milk production, cells that exist in mother’s milk itself, and coax those same cells to do the job in a test tube? Then, select for the most abundant versions of the cells with the highest success rate for lactation and volume. And, program or code the cells to produce more favorable traits, such as critical molecules needed for certain stages of infant development.

This is neither futurism nor science fiction, this process is in advanced development today by leading cellular biology, precision biology, alternative food companies like TurtleTree Labs, Pty, Singapore & Silicon Valley, founded in 2019 and BioMilq, Durham, North Carolina, founded in 2020. TurtleTree Labs’ approach applies equally well to producing mother’s milk from multiple animal species using the very same process, e.g. cow milk for human consumption or milk to save an endangered species. BioMilq’s technological approach is more focused on human health using personalized medicine.

Lactation is a lifeline to our species and cellular production helps ensure safe and reliable supply. Cellular production, as an alternative to animal husbandry, is also resource efficient (land, water and carbon output) and therefore a sustainable innovation. Lab-produced mother’s milk enables wide access to biological molecules that lead to better outcomes for all of society. 

Market Need

There is a growing market demand for mother’s milk in developed and developing countries, because mother’s increasingly are unable to continue with breastfeeding after only a few months. 

There are many reasons why women cannot or do not breastfeed for the recommended amount of time. 1-5% of women have an inability to produce enough milk for their baby. Low milk supply can be caused by insufficient glandular tissue, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), or hypothyroidism. Some women are on medications that are not compatible with breastfeeding, or have infectious diseases such as HIV and should not breastfeed. 

For the 95% of mothers who have the ability to breastfeed, only 46% continue breastfeeding until the recommended 2 years of age, according to a UNICEF 2016 study. Various reasons for this include negative societal attitudes towards breastfeeding in public and the workplace, inadequate workplace maternity leave policies, the lack of supportive networks for mothers, the lack of a strong desire to breastfeed, and limited awareness about the benefits of breastfeeding. 

In developing countries, only 39% of children less than 6 months of age are breastfed exclusively and formula-feeding poses challenges where access to safe water is poor. Malnutrition in developing countries is the underlying cause of one-third of all deaths in children under 5 years of age. Continuous breastfeeding, alongside vaccination and adequate nutrition are low-cost measures that could prevent more than 60% of these deaths, according to UNICEF. Undernutrition caused by a diet lacking in sufficient nutrients can cause stunted growth, acute weight loss, low birth weight, and micronutrient deficiencies. 

For women who may not have the ability or desire to breastfeed, TurtleTree Labs’ technological development around cultured breastmilk can be a nutritious infant and baby nutrition solution meeting impact outcomes discussed below. Moreover, TurtleTree Labs’ approach applies to broader opportunities in the dairy milk and milk products markets. 

For these reasons, New Luna’s founder, Gary J. Schefsky, targeted this sector for investment and became an early investor in TurtleTree Labs, Pty.

Large Market Opportunities

Infant nutrition is a $45 billion market is set to grow to $103 billion by 2026; the global dairy market is valued at $718 billion and, due to a growing population, the demand is set to increase by 35% in 2030. TurtleTree Labs proprietary technology is capable of addressing both markets. Asian markets are projected to be the most lucrative growth opportunities for both infant nutrition and dairy, which is exactly where TurtleTree Labs is founded and their initial target market. ?(f.n. 1)

Breast Milk

TurtleTree Labs’ novel cell-based technology produces breast milk directly from lactating mammary cells found in mother’s milk. Cells are propagated using TurtleTree Labs’ own proprietary media. Cell media is the environment in which the cells grow and proliferate and is composed of ‘food’ for the cell, providing the cell nutrients the body naturally provides within the bloodstream. Once the cells propagate, the mammary cells are filtered out, leaving behind the final milk product.

TurtleTree Labs’ mammary cellular approach has significant benefits for producing non-human dairy milk and milk components. Instead of culturing each dairy component separately and then mixing and combining for a solution, TurtleTree Labs’ approach can produce the major milk components, such as whey and casein, using only mammary cells. With precision biology techniques, different nutritional profiles can be regulated or expressed. For instance, bovine milk could include minimal or zero lactose, for consumers who are lactose intolerant, or contain less cholesterol.

TurtleTree Labs is not alone in recognizing the market need for breast milk through cultured biology. 

BioMilq is in research and development for cultured mother’s milk, using extracted mammary stem cells not from the milk, but rather from mother’s tissue. Unlike TurtleTree Labs, Biomilq does not have the patented technology to allow for diversification of its portfolio to include other mammalian dairy products. BioMilq’s approach deploys personalized biotech medicine, removing a candidate’s own cells to produce bio-similar results. There is an increasing trend in personalized medicine and regenerative medicine, so BioMilq’s approach has promise as a possible therapeutic treatment. However, personalized medicine, even by major biotech producers, has not achieved rapid adoption and faces various go-to-market challenges. The personalized nature of BioMilq’s solution may limit wide-spread adoption, but may function well in unique bio-pharma.

Dairy Milk & Dairy Products

Cows produce milk with various molecular benefits for their particular species and for which humans consume without modification. Additional dairy products are produced from cow milk by manual separation of molecules. For example, casein, whey, and fat solids are isolated using a centrifuge. Recipe additives and an aging process are deployed to produce products such as yogurt, cheese, and ice cream.

Whatever automation and production innovation remains with traditional approaches are of marginal benefit. Traditional and mainstream livestock management practices, and factory farming, in particular, are increasingly raising ethical animal treatment challenges. Moreover, food safety and security issues are exacerbated by the very nature of large scale animal agriculture. We are now well-aware of species-to-species pandemic disease, but this has been rampant in animal husbandry for decades and leads to high fluctuations in food costs.

The operational and production costs to run the dairy industry at scale are very high on a cost per litre of milk or kilogram of meat produced. Factors include feed cost, high energy and water cost, housing and animal care, and the labor and equipment for milk production. Feedstock costs fluctuate so frequently that they often require government subsidy intervention. Increasing extreme weather events such as prolonged heat waves, drought, flooding, and natural disasters further jeopardize future feedstock yields. Finally, distribution supply chains are inefficient, produced products are often nowhere near markets, leading to even less sustainable results. Consequently, the milk industry operates at very low margin.

These traditional methods are not sustainable, for example, rearing and production require vast acreage and natural resources, and accounts for 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.(f.n. 2) They are misaligned to our planets’ need to heal itself from centuries of soil overuse and topsoil depletion, contamination to our waterways, and rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations leading to rapid global warming. Traditional practices are neither optimal to animal welfare, food safety, nor a reliable source of nutrition and protein to the multiple global markets.

This is why cellular agriculture companies, such as Perfect Day, New Culture, and LegenDairy have isolated casein, whey, and fats from the animal stem cells using precision biology methods. Many of these companies deploy bio-fermentation, using yeast and microflora, to proliferate the isolated proteins. The key ingredients are combined with other molecules, including water, sugar, fats to make cheese or simulate ice-cream.

• Perfect Day: Perfect day is creating milk protein using fermentation methods. Their end product is a protein powder (whey and casein) to be used as a food ingredient through their partnership with ADM.
• LegenDairy Foods: Through a fermentation process, LegenDairy Foods transforms microorganisms and sugar into milk protein and then to dairy products (similar to Perfect Day’s process). They do not produce complete milk.
• New Culture: New Culture Food focuses on creating real cheese with the use of microbes such as yeast. These microbes are cultivated under specific conditions and the organisms start producing proteins which they then add to various recipes.

These methodologies are expected to reach cost parity with analog animal husbandry-derived products by 2023 - 2025. (f.n. 4) While this is promising, it is still a narrowly-focused product process vs. producing the milk itself in all its components. Production of milk using cellular and precision biology is of tremendous promise and another reason that isolation of lactating mammary cells for bio-production represents a massive market opportunity.

TurtleTree Labs’ Combined Approach

Founded by CEO Fengru Lin, and Chief Strategist Max Rye, TurtleTree Labs is led by a well-rounded team of alumni from Google, and other U.S. and Asian disruptive technology ventures. The founders are complemented by an excess of 20 full-time employees supported by some of the most prominent investor groups in sustainable agriculture, including Green Monday Ventures, Prince Khaled’s KBW Ventures, CPT Capital, Artesian, and New Luna Ventures’ Gary Schefsky. TurtleTree Labs has been awarded many recognitions, including first place and $1 million from The Liveability Challenge, a challenge sponsored by Temasek Foundation, Singapore which seeks solutions to some of the biggest problems faced in South-East Asia. Temasek is a Singapore government-backed venture capital investment fund.

TurtleTree Labs has received much support from the Singapore government, which has a goal of providing 30% of the population’s nutritional needs locally by 2030. This includes government funding, lab space, and permission to continue their operations during the coronavirus circuit breaker period. Singapore also supports a pro-cellular food regulatory environment. Additionally they benefit from business partnerships from a myriad of food and dairy technology companies within Singapore and the Southeast Asian region. 

TurtleTree Labs has a unique proprietary cell-based technology that it will use to license production of a wide variety of human and non-human dairy products from mammalian cells. These partnerships with regional, large-scale producers will give TurtleTree products immediate access to large markets, such as Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and South America. This distributed and scalable model via platform license to partner-branded production is an innovative way to bring this new biotechnology quickly to consumers.

TurtleTree Labs is currently optimizing their processes and intends to have a pilot plant by mid-2021, then joint R&D with distribution partners for scaled production. After successful market penetration of breastmilk, TurtleTree Labs plans to expand its technology licenses to bovine milk and other animal dairy products. 

Impact Benefits 

TurtleTree Labs is addressing food security, food safety, health, and resource efficiency - important categories of impact. “Our focus on impact will disrupt the multi-billion dollar dairy industry while reducing the carbon footprint on this planet and creating milk free of contaminants. Our innovation will provide millions access to safer, reliable and higher quality dairy products,” according to the TurtleTree Labs’ position statement.

Resource efficiency 

Cellular derived agriculture requires 1/10th the cropland compared to animal-derived. For example, on a global basis six times the land area of Germany is set-aside for cropland for animal feed and grazing, just to produce meat and milk (f.n. 4) which can be reduced to indoor lab production. It is also estimated that 7% of all greenhouse gas emissions are from ruminant animals.

Just like cell-cultured meat, cultured dairy can reap great resource efficiencies. TurtleTree Labs maintains that its products can be 95% more resource-efficient than conventional animal agriculture. For example, while there are varying estimates of how much water input it takes for conventional agriculture to produce a gallon of milk, anywhere from 90 to 1,000 gallons, the cellular method reduces water significantly by eliminating the cow and cow feed crops in the milk production lifecycle. This in turn reduces cost and conserves precious resources for other high-impact needs, such as growing crops for direct human consumption. After the cells are cultured, propagated, filtered and powdered, the aim is for TurtleTree Labs' consumers to only have to potentially add the specific amount of water needed to produce their milk.

Food security

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for better food safety and the fragility of our global food supply chain. TurtleTree Labs offers a disruptive technology for infant nutrition and the global dairy market in that it can provide high-quality dairy products without dairy farms or the risk of animal or crop disease that can affect product output. With their patented biotechnology that can be applied to any mammal, the extent of products SKUs, formulations, and supplements within the dairy market can be widely differentiated. What it does with cow milk, it could theoretically do with camels, goats, sheep, kangaroos, and other mammals, introducing a new variety of products that have never been widely available. Endangered animal species could benefit as well, with the Smithsonian Institute having previously indicated their interest in employing TurtleTree Labs’ technology for Snow Leopard milk.

Food safety

TurtleTree Labs is working with Singapore Food Agency before these products enter the market. The TurtleTree Labs team will work closely with the government of Singapore to establish a regulatory framework and ensure food is safe for consumption. The safety of this product will go through rigorous testing and several governmental analyses before being offered to the public, ensuring that the topmost standards of food safety are met.

Health

The most important health benefit of cell cultured breastmilk will be its essential enzymes, growth factors, anti-parasites, anti-allergies, anti-viruses, hormones, and that conventional infant formula does not contain. Infant formula is not recommended for infants under 6 months of age, as it could cause injuries to an infant’s digestive system. TurtleTree Lab's infant nutrition and their later-stage non-human dairy products will allow for customization of nutrient profiles, to cater to those who are lactose intolerant or those who opt for a low cholesterol diet. 

Conclusion

A mother’s breast milk is of high importance to our species survival, leads directly to human health outcomes, and is in high-demand as a third-party product. Infant formula, while a useful product today, lacks the complex molecular makeup found in human lactation. Cell-based or cultured mother’s breast milk meets growing market opportunities while improving food security, safety, health, and resource efficiency.

Companies like TurtleTree Labs deploy precision and cell-based biology to produce actual mother’s milk from lactating mammary cells found in a mother’s breast milk. BioMilq deploys a similar approach in the context of precision medicine for infant nutrition. These products are on-trend to meet critical market needs.

Cow dairy and dairy related products are also in high-demand in emerging markets and due to population growth. Yet, cow dairy production operates on low margins, faces increasing food safety risks, and results in non-sustainable practices. Cellular cow milk, like TurtleTree Lab’s proprietary lactating mammary cell method, that is capable of customization, provides opportunities to meet this growing demand at scale, high margin and in a sustainable manner.

TurtleTree Labs’ unique partner platform licensing model will enable rapid global market penetration for infant nutrition and dairy milk production, e.g. in big cities, with small land footprints, and short distance distribution.

If you are interested in partnering opportunities and New Luna’s syndication investment model for companies like TurtleTree Labs please contact New Luna.

(c) Gary Schefsky, November 30, 2020. All Rights Reserved.

New Luna Ventures is a leading impact venture capital advisor and investor in the Food 2.0, agriculture, energy, community enrichment, and enabling software industries. New Luna forms investment syndications with corp. strategic venture units and family offices. Together, we help entrepreneurs build sustainable ventures by measuring impact, providing actionable plans, enhanced communications, and expanded access to markets. For further information contact: [email protected] 

McKenna Maxwell, Analyst, New Luna Ventures is a contributor to this article. McKenna has a passion for sustainability and the future of food. She is an independently published writer on the cultured meat sector.

f.n. 1 UNICEF article: https://www.unicef.org/nutrition/index_24824.html. AgFunder article https://agfundernews.com/why-is-a-vegan-saudi-prince-is-investing-in-breast-milk-made-from-stem-cells.html

f.n. 2  https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/

f.n. 3 Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030, The Second Domestication of Plants and Animals, the Disruption of the Cow, and the Collapse of Industrial Livestock Farming. ReThinkX, Catherine Tubb & Tony Seba, September, 2019.

F.n. 4 Id.