Biomilq and the New Science of Artificial Breast Milk

March 10, 2023

(The New Yorker) – You could call the bottle’s contents Biomilq, or maybe just milk, or, as the engineer did—indicating a number of smaller bottles also stowed in the freezer—“our best shots to date.” The frozen puck represented a week and a half’s worth of output from a single line of lab-cultured human mammary cells. The company hopes to use these cells and others like them to re-create as closely as possible the process of making human milk. About three years before my visit, in February of 2020, Biomilq announced that it had successfully used cells to produce lactose and casein, a sugar and a protein found in breast milk. “Our opinion as a company—and most of us internally, too—is that breast-feeding, at the breast, has benefits that no one will ever be able to mimic,” Egger, a food scientist turned entrepreneur, told me. “If you can breast-feed—do it. Great. But the reality is, a majority of parents cannot exclusively breast-feed. . . . And that’s not for lack of trying.” (Read More)