Biomilq, a North Carolina-based start-up targeting infant nutrition by attempting to reproduce mothers’ breast milk in a lab, just earned the backing of the world’s top investors.
While that may seem like a longshot, Biomilq has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates‘ investment firm.
The dairy industry is a significant source of greenhouse gasses, with as much as 10 percent of the global market estimated as going to the production of baby formula milk. The industry represents a significant carbon footprint. Which is why U.S. start-up Biomilq hopes to artificially produce ‘real’ human breast milk from cultured mammary epithelial cells.
Biomilq is making sufficient progress with the advanced biotechnology research involved to believe it could have a commercially viable product within five years. The company produced proof of concept for its plans back in February, with a process that produced both lactose and casein, two key components of human breast milk.
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Biomilq’s founders are Michelle Egger, a food scientist, and Leila Strickland, a cell biologist. Strickland struggled to breastfeed her now 10-year-old son when he was born prematurely. This motivated her to look for a better solution than traditional baby formula. She said:
“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.”
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She teamed up with Egger, who had been looking into better breast milk alternatives while working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Egger was then focused on “affordable plant-based protein sources for low-and-middle-income countries.” However, she was excited by Strickland’s confidence that science has progressed quickly enough that lab-cultured human breast milk was becoming a viable alternative.
Last September, the two scientists founded Biomilq and secured funding through Gate’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund. The fund’s board members include a star roster of entrepreneurs including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Sir Richard Branson, and Michael Bloomberg, the financial data and media mogul who is also the former mayor of New York.
