close

New health product business centers on breast milk

2 min read

CITY OF INDUSTRY, Calif. – When Gretty Amaya took an unpaid maternity leave five months ago, she started what she calls a part-time job to help pay the bills. Amaya, who lives in Miami, has made more than $2,000 so far by pumping breast milk and selling what is left over after feeding her baby daughter.

Frozen milk from Amaya – and from hundreds of other women throughout the country – is flown here to what resembles a pharmaceutical factory. Inside, it is concentrated into a high-protein product fed to extremely premature babies in neonatal intensive care units, at a cost of thousands of dollars a baby.

Breast milk, that most ancient and fundamental of nourishments, is becoming an industrial commodity, and one of the newest frontiers of the biotechnology industry – even as concerns abound over this fast-growing business. The company that owns the factory, Prolacta Bioscience, has received $46 million in investments from life science venture capitalists.

“This is white plasma,” said Scott A. Elster, the company’s chief executive. He was comparing milk to blood plasma, which has long been collected from donors and made into valuable medical products like immune globulin, which helps fight infections, and clotting factors for hemophiliacs.

Concentrated milk could be just the start. Researchers say that breast milk, which evolved over eons to provide optimal nutrition and protect babies from infection, is brimming with potential therapeutics, not only for babies but possibly for adults, to treat intestinal or infectious diseases, like the bowel ailment known as Crohn’s disease, for example.

But the commercialization of breast milk makes many people uneasy. They worry that companies might capture most of the excess breast milk and make products that would be too costly for many babies, while leaving less milk available for nonprofit milk banks.

Companies like Glycosyn, Jennewein Biotechnologie and Glycom, which has worked with Nestlé, are trying to synthesize these sugars to make products that would nourish a healthy gut “microbiome.” Prolacta and a competitor, Medolac Laboratories, say their ability to collect milk nationally will allow them to extract those sugars from the milk.

“We are at the tip of the iceberg for milk,” said Bruce German, director of the Foods for Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, and chairman of Evolve Biosystems, a small company trying to develop nutritional products based on newly emerging findings about breast milk.

CUSTOMER LOGIN

If you have an account and are registered for online access, sign in with your email address and password below.

NEW CUSTOMERS/UNREGISTERED ACCOUNTS

Never been a subscriber and want to subscribe, click the Subscribe button below.

Starting at $3.75/week.

Subscribe Today