Medicosnext
Research is ongoing throughout the world on producing animal-free food products like cultured meat and cultured cow’s milk. While the cultured meat market is quite well developed, such is not the case with cultured milk. Currently, only three companies are tackling this subject; one of them being BioMilk (now rebranded as Wilk), a groundbreaking Israeli food tech company that is currently the only company to have its product in the developmental stage. The company, founded by Dr. Nurit Argov-Argaman and Maggie Levy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2018, makes use of knowledge acquired from 10 years of research by Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists.
The company’s goal is to produce milk that is close to the composition of commercial cow milk, is synthetic- or plant additives-free, and has less hormones and antibiotics content than the traditional product. In December 2021, BioMilk declared that the company is developing a process to produce cultured human breast milk with all of the complex composition found in natural breast milk, which is essential for immune system development.
The company aims to produce cultured breast milk that is as close as what nature has to offer. The technology for cultured breast milk production is similar to the production of cultured milk from other animals, all of which require a long and comprehensive regulatory process. While the first sample of cultured cow’s milk was released for testing in 2021, the company expects cultured breast milk to be available for testing in 2022. The company’s long-term goal is to use its expertise to develop its tech for dairy industry markets, with all-dairy products, as well as the nutriceutical field, using its cultured milk to develop pharmaceutical alternatives like pills and additives. In February 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded the company patent approval for its Methods and Systems for in-Vitro Milk Production.
California and Singapore-based TurtleTree Labs, meanwhile, claims to be the first company in the world to use cells to create raw milk, using cells from mammals that are grown in their lab and encouraged to produce milk in giant bioreactors. North Carolina-based BIOMILQ is also developing a similar product from cells of human breast tissue and milk, which are fed nutrients and grown in flasks, and then incubated in a bioreactor that mimics the human breast environment. The company still has some way to go from getting a product to market, since mammary cells need to be grown on a much larger scale, and economically. Besides, regulators have to be convinced about the safety of the product. Additionally, experts opine that not all the components of breast milk can be replicated in a bioreactor.
