S6. E5: Michelle Egger: Human Breastmilk Made in a Lab
Today’s episode is the first of a four-part series on the future of food, sponsored by VegFund. VegFund empowers vegan advocates worldwide through grant funding and supporting effective outreach that inspires people to choose and maintain a vegan lifestyle.
“We see 84% of moms in the U.S. convert to infant formula partially or entirely in that first six months of life before the recommended period of exclusive breastfeeding ends. We see two thirds of moms express extreme shame and guilt and stigma for the way they feed their children.
“And, we continue to see that the infant formula industry in general has really pillaged and plundered in a lot of ways on parents wanting to do what's best for their child, but really not having better options and having very little innovation to really think about how to better nourish a child.”
- Michelle Egger
Michelle Egger is a food scientist and the CEO and co-founder of BIOMILQ, a woman-owned, science-led, mother-centered startup that is creating human breastmilk in a lab, by culturing mammary cells. This has the potential for disrupting the infant formula industry forever; and will give families a more nutritious option for feeding their babies.
Michelle founded BIOMILQ with cell biologist Lelia Strickland in January 2020, and soon after they received $3.5 million in funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates' investment firm.
I’m beyond excited that BIOMILQ exists. They are creating a revolutionary product that will one day be on grocery store shelves across the world. It will be a game changer for mothers who struggle with breastfeeding, for the planet, and for a whole lot of cows.
Learn More About BIOMILQ
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Transcript:
Michelle: [00:00:16] So we see eighty four percent of moms in the U.S. convert to infant formula partially or entirely in that first six months of life, before the recommended period of exclusive breastfeeding ends. We see two thirds of moms expressing extreme shame and guilt and stigma for the way they feed their children. We continue to see that the infant formula industry in general has really pillaged and plundered in a lot of ways. On parents wanting to do what's best for their child but really not having better options, and having very little innovation to really think about how to better nourish a child.
Elizabeth: [00:00:52] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. Today's episode is part of a four part series sponsored by Veg Fund. Veg Fund empowers vegan advocates worldwide. Through grant funding and supporting effective outreach that inspires people to choose and maintain a vegan lifestyle. For the months of May and June, Species Unite is celebrating plant based eating with vegan nights. Vegan nights really just means we'd love for you to invite friends over or just cook for your family, but make a plant based meal. Take a photo, post it to Instagram with the hashtag #speciesunitevegannights and you will be entered to win one of six, two hundred and seventy five dollar gift baskets filled with all sorts of vegan delights. So go to our website to sign up SpeciesUnite.com. This conversation is with Michelle Egger. Michelle is a food scientist and the CEO and co-founder of Bio Milk. Bio Milk is a women owned, science led and mother centered startup that is creating human breast milk in a lab by culturing memory cells. This has potential for disrupting the infant formula industry, which is made from cows and will enable families to have a more nutritious and sustainable option for feeding their babies. Hi, Michelle, thank you so much for being here today.
Michelle: [00:02:42] Super excited to be here, thank you for having me.
Elizabeth: [00:02:44] For the past year and a half, you have been co-founder of Bio Milk, which I want to get into and talk about and celebrate. But before we do that, I want to talk about where you came from before this and your life as a food scientist and all the things that kind of led to January 2020.
Michelle: [00:03:04] As you mentioned, food science is my training. I've always had two core passions in life, even as a little kid, and that was cooking for people. I love feeding people. Food is absolutely my love language. It was pretty clear to everyone around me in my life that food was always going to be in the center of everything that I did. That being said, my other core passion and what I spent most of my time on was finding ways to help other people. I always love volunteering. I spearheaded a variety of different non-profit initiatives and groups that continue to translate as I got older and older and more into deeper and deeper tech where I started to ask myself, how can I best use my skill sets to really advance the world and food science, food technology? Bringing new technologies to developing parts of the world and thinking about alternative proteins, it started to become very clear that there were many passionate causes that I had, but I got to kind of marry both of them into one if I entered the space.
Elizabeth: [00:03:56] So you and Layla met and she was already doing this?
Michelle: [00:04:00] Yeah, Layla had been, the intro I was given was, there's this crazy woman making milk outside of the body, do you want to meet her? I always joke, if anybody ever says the phrase Crazy Woman to you, you absolutely know you want to meet them because that is code in the woman's world of, like, being actually impactful and empowering and trying to be different. So I was like, Yes, I want to meet this woman. She had been working on this since 2013 as a weird science hobby as she likes to call it, would go to the slaughterhouse, get an utted off of a warm cow. Try to look the other way. Dissect tissue, grow it up in her lab. Trying to produce milk, which to many of us who are strong animal advocates, sounds pretty gruesome, but it's the way to figure out how you reduce animal agriculture. For her, the passion point had always been as a new mom. We have to learn in these model systems like cows, but what we really want to do is find a way to make breast milk outside of the body. That's going to have the most unlocking potential for human ability and development and immunological systems. Also unlock and empower women to not be so tied up and how they feed their children and the shame and judgment that comes with anywhere in this world. Whether you're trying to breastfeed or use infant formula or follow a vegan diet, you're going to get damned if you do, damned if you don't and how you feed your kids today.
Elizabeth: [00:05:14] So many women have a terrible time. Will you talk about some of the actual problems that women are up against? I think especially so many people, men, a lot of them aren't really aware of how enormous this is.
Michelle: [00:05:30] Yeah. I was joking with someone yesterday about the fact that we'll talk to male investors or male allies and they're always like, Well, we had a daughter and breastfeeding was so hard for us. I know that dual parenting, theoretically, you should be sharing the burden. It is hard on a family to try to figure out how to balance a new schedule and feed a child. But if you're exclusively breastfeeding, the mother of your child is either attached, nipple to mouth or breast pump, probably 10 hours a day on average. So using the royal ‘we’ to describe breastfeeding is always a little like I understand, and I know you deeply empathize, but there's something distinct about speaking to moms. Which I always like to give the caveat, I've never breastfed. I am not a mother myself, so I absolutely empathize and sympathize, but I can't speak from experience. But it is interesting that I think we have kind of this preconceived notion of like, Oh well, we all work to raise the child and that's absolutely true in many capacities. But feeding absolutely falls on mostly women in a family, a more heteronormative, stereotypical family structure. So long story short, the status of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is a beautiful process for a lot of mothers. Incredible bonding potential. Nutritionally, it is absolutely the right and best way to feed your child. We know human milk oligosaccharides are the sugar components of human breast milk that are able to be most easily broken down and develop the immunological system of a child through their gut through their microbiome. There is no way to replicate all 300 plus human milk oligosaccharides outside of the body today, so there's actually benefits for that. You also think about just kind of how weird it is that we use milk derived for calves, for baby humans. We can go through component by component of the ten thousand five hundred plus why it makes sense to have a human version versus a bovine version. But the easiest summary is to say, Yeah, it's a little weird to think about that. Evolutionarily, every mammal on this planet has developed a milk optimized perfect for their offspring. Breaking that cycle is kind of weird. Adults drinking milk is kind of a strange thing to do. We could go off on a long tangent on that, I'm sure. But especially when you think about those first six months of life, in general you're supposed to breastfeed exclusively, if you can. For all water, all nutrients, everything and then form breaking and moving to a dairy based powder that you add water back to is really not equivalent. So we see eighty four percent of moms in the U.S. convert to infant formula partially or entirely in that first six months of life before the recommended period of exclusive breastfeeding ends. We see two thirds of moms express extreme shame and guilt and stigma for the way they feed their children and that cognitive load is definitely contributing to at the time a very emotional and hormonal stage in their lives. So having one more thing layered on that, they feel like they're doing wrong. It's really not healthy. We continue to see that the infant formula industry in general has really pillaged and plundered in a lot of ways on parents wanting to do what's best for their child, but really not having better options and having very little innovation to really think about how to better nourish a child. So unfortunately, we're kind of still feeding children like we thought the nineteen fifties made sense to, and we've innovated so many other parts of the child rearing experience and feeding is still one that we're kind of stuck one hundred years back at this rate.
Elizabeth: [00:09:03] So you met Layla and had you even thought of this or heard of anything like this?
Michelle: [00:09:08] I had considered cellular agriculture as a field, and frankly, before I entered it, I was like, that's never going to scale. As a scientist, I was like, ‘That's not going to work.’ Having worked in these huge eighteen hundred thousand liter batches, I mean, just really, really big equipment and technology that I had worked with. I was kind of like, you're not going to be able to take this cute little thing from a bench and bring it all the way up. It's not going to happen. Then I met Layla and milk specifically is a really interesting target because we're not utilizing the cells to be the product. We're utilizing the cells essentially biomanufacturing. So they are the equipment in some ways.
Elizabeth: [00:09:45] Ok, I'm going to stop you for a second because maybe if you tell us how they work?
Michelle: [00:09:53] So I always like to cite this. If you are familiar with cellular agriculture for cultivated meat, for instance, they are like angus farmers. They are raising up the highest number of cells, just like you would cattle to harvest them and eat them. For us, we are much more like shepherds. We grow cells to a place where they're happy and healthy, bouncing through the green fields. We give them an environment where they feel safe. We give them the right nutrients and the right spacing, and then they stay in place and produce milk for us. We do not harvest them. We do not eat them in any way. So this cell type specifically lends itself to that. It's like your skin. It's an epithelial cell, human mammary epithelial cells. So it creates boundaries or borders or monolayers really well. It essentially is able to line things. So in the body it lines the mammary glands and it keeps blood on one side and where milk is secreted on the other and our bioreactors, it's the exact same. So we basically allow them to create a tissue layer, where they are pulling in nutrients from one side and secreting milk out the other. Never intermixing the two. Which means they are really doing the heavy lifting. We are not harvesting cells, we're not regrowing them. They are a biomanufacturing facility and in a lot of ways.
Elizabeth: [00:11:03] That's incredible. Just to be really clear. So you take a cell and you put it in the bioreactor?
Michelle: [00:11:08] More or less. Yep
Elizabeth: [00:11:09] OK.
Michelle: [00:11:10] We take some cells, they go into the bioreactor.
Elizabeth: [00:11:12] Right and then they start producing milk?
Michelle: [00:11:15] They need a little bit of coaxing at first to grow into place. They have got to be told that it's warm and safe and they're going to get fed, just like raising baby animals. We have a scientist that always jokes saying ‘Oh, my babies, they're growing up.’ She's always growing up, lots of babies. But we grow them to a place where they can sense each other, they’re neighbors and they pack in tightly. They zipper into place, really to create this monolayer. Then at that point, when they're ready, we're able to stimulate them with the right nutrients and the right hormones, just as they would receive in the body to be able to produce milk.
Elizabeth: [00:11:48] And how long does it take from putting the cells in the bioreactor to milk?
Michelle: [00:11:54] Not too long. So we're right now we're looking at about a 10 day cycle approximately from when you think about that, you could pull cells from a man or woman, gender the cells doesn't matter and make milk.
Elizabeth: [00:12:05] That's just astonishing. So go back to Layla, when you and she met each other and she said, ‘Hey, I've been kind of working on this mad scientist project.’ Were you like, I’m in. How did this go down?
Michelle: [00:12:22] So I met Layla at a really challenging time in her life. Layla has two kids. She has a small horse farm. She had tried to find another partner previously for the business that hadn't worked and just generally had some disappointing results. She had been working on this alone essentially for seven years, and she was just hammering her head against the wall, six years when I met her. I saw in her a really determined woman that deserved to be helped, and I didn't really think about what was in it for me, frankly. I kind of just thought I was going to, like, help her out and advise her and like, do some back of the napkin business things that she needed that she didn't have yet the skills for. Then I would finish out my second year of business school and call it a day and go off to get a corporate job and live that life. It became increasingly clear very quickly that we were so beautifully complementary. We believe so deeply in what we were working on and kind of fate had brought us together to be able to work on this together. We needed one another equivalently to be able to make this happen. We still both feel quite a responsibility for the potential of this technology and that we have to give it our best shot and bring it into the world as effectively as we can.
Elizabeth: [00:13:40] So then you became bio milk a year and a half ago? So what happens? Walk us through it, because it's been a crazy pandemic for you?
Michelle: [00:13:51] It's been a rocket ship, an endless rocket ship. My stress tolerance is so high now that, like other people are like, Oh, the world is burning down, and I'm like, Oh, this is a pretty good week. I am eating breakfast, like, I got to drink tea today. But yeah, we founded bio milk and we were like, well, maybe we should find some non-dilutive funding to operate a proof of concept experiment on human cells which Lila had done with cows but had never done with humans yet. Because human cells are more expensive and harder to get, they're harder as a science hobbyist to be able to derive human tissue to grow from. We started to put together some plans like, Oh, maybe we'll go find some advisers or mentors. So we took a trip to San Francisco and just met with some folks to kind of get a feel for, like, what would it take to raise money? And suddenly we were talking to all of these very important venture capitalists. We kind of raised money.
Elizabeth: [00:14:42] So now you can afford cells.
Michelle: [00:14:46] We can afford cells. Although every once in a while, I'll still get an order, come across my desk and I'll be like, How much? And they're like, Michelle, you raised money for this. I'm like, Oh, yeah, that's right. Ok, I guess that's the best price we can get. But yeah, we raised a three and a half million dollar seed round last spring. Our lead was Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which people always ask, Huh, aren't they into reducing gigatons of CO2? The answer is yes, but why am I here talking to you as well. I mean, five to 15 percent of the liquid global dairy market ends up in infant formula. It's a product that most parents haven't even considered the planetary implications of. Even early on, we don't talk a huge amount about sustainability, prevention of greenhouse gasses, although we've done a lot of LCA analysis on our own time. In part because we don't want to shame parents anymore than they already are for a set of choices that they have that aren't great. So to us, it felt like from the beginning we could work on this as kind of a stealth sustainability product. You could be sold on personal benefit, nutritional benefit and happen to be better for the planet. Rather than telling parents you're murdering the planet, maybe you should consider a different way to feed your child, it just doesn't roll off the tongue that way.
Elizabeth: [00:15:54] Now you can make the milk with human cells, right? What was it like the first time that that happened?
Michelle: [00:16:02] The first time we got good results back that made us believe, Gosh, we've made human milk.
Elizabeth: [00:16:08] Yes, this is insane.
Michelle: [00:16:10] Both are kind of like, ‘Oh, my God, it worked.’ You know, I think we both had been holding our breath a little bit like, well, will it or won't it? And how easy or how hard? It's not to say everything's perfect. We're still absolutely optimizing. We're not making human bioidentical mother's milk today. There are many differences going to be between our product and directly what comes from the breast. We have to remind ourselves sometimes that what we're talking about sounds like pigs flying to a lot of the world, and it's just an average day in the lab for us. We kind of have to reground ourselves and our team frequently on like, I know that sounds totally normal to you, but we have to figure it out, explain it to your grandmother. How would you explain it to your grandmother, right? Because you know, what we're doing is quite outlandishly bold and it's kind of old hat to us. So we have to reinforce it like it's bold. Remember, it's bold for the rest of the world.
Elizabeth: [00:17:01] It's more than bold. I mean, it's astonishing. So where it is now and then versus where it will be once it's out on the market, which I'm assuming is a few years at least.
Michelle: [00:17:15] Yeah, we always say three to five years. There are others in the space who say, Oh, we're going to have a product out next year. I'm like one component of human milk is not human breast milk. But when we're estimating where we can do something that we would comfortably call cultured breast milk ourselves, it'll be three to five years. By the time we get through the regulatory approvals required and safety testing and all that should be done before we feed it to the most precious beings on the planet.
Elizabeth: [00:17:36] And will that be bioidentical then?
Michelle: [00:17:38] So we're calling it nutritionally identical, and that's pretty intentional. We’re not necessarily creating the immunological components that would confer immunity, for instance. So there's a lot of discussion right now of can COVID pass through breast milk? We are not producing COVID antibodies and putting them in bio milk. So it won't be bio identical to what you might be able to produce from the breast, but definitely nutritionally equivalent. So looking at the macro and micronutrients still hitting the same thresholds that you would expect to see in an average sample of breast milk and making sure that that bioavailability, digestibility, isometric form, everything is the best format that can be utilized by a child or by a human in general for development.
Elizabeth: [00:18:19] For people outside of the tech world and the food science world. What are some of the reactions you get when you tell people what you're doing?
Michelle: [00:18:26] One of the experiences I didn't mention or I won't mention much is I also worked on some natural and organic brands so Larabar, Cascadian farms, kind of that world and I have to spend a lot of time with consumers that have really strong food beliefs about what is safe and what is natural and what should be consumed and transitioned from that into what I'm doing now at boi milk. So my initial reaction was that consumers who like to go pick up their eggs and speak to the farmers market attendant about the chickens they came from are never going to be comfortable with this product because it is very scientifically heavy, intervened, right? I mean, there is a lot of science that goes into what we're doing. But the frank truth is that parents are faced with such terrible options today that even consumers that you would never expect to be open to something like this want to learn more because what they have on the table is just not adequate. Being a modern parent in our modern reality sucks, frankly. There are many ways that it's really hard and so having an option that can even get that much closer. There's a lot less concern about is it safe? Do I believe this? How does it work? And much more concern about do I believe you? Do I think you're going to make sure that it's safe? Do you feel confident and comfortable in what you're working on? And of course, we'll go through the safety and quality testing required to prove that. But as a female led organization, we very much guarantee that we're not going to put out a product that we wouldn't feed to our own children.
Elizabeth: [00:19:53] Talk a little about safety. What are the fears around that?
Michelle: [00:19:57] So one of the things we actually talk about a lot as a team is the bioethics of producing a human product. There's never previously been a product that comes from a human body that we eat. When you say that aloud, people are always like, oh, you're right, like there's nothing that you don't go and buy a human byproduct to consume. At this point, at least most people don't. I'm not going to get into the weird niches of the world, but like the average person doesn't go to a grocery store and buy any human derived products today. So with that comes a lot of questions about how do you source the cells? Who are the cells from? How are they treated? They're not sentient beings in the way animals are, but that doesn't mean that there aren't correct and ethical practices that should be utilized. Historically, science in terms of tissue acquisition has been very lax about how tissue is harvested? Who is informed on how it's utilized and where it comes from? So we're very particular and very, very stringent about everyone having to get full consent, knows exactly what we're doing with these samples, is comfortable and even delighted that we hopefully will be profitable with some of these samples. So that's one of the question areas that there's a surprisingly large amount of nuance in even consumers who aren't necessarily very technical, who even just heard of the story of Henrietta Lacks and want to know more about HeLa cells. You're not doing the same thing HeLa cells have done right. I honestly, as a scientist, love to see that level of questioning and scientific literacy because that's what we need in our world. If this last year has proven anything, it's that science is pretty important to a lot of us and that we all need to understand it just a little bit better so that we know what is believable and what's safe and where we should have questions or push back as a population?
Elizabeth: [00:21:43] Part of that, I would assume, is education. To the more people that just start hearing about this, it becomes more like cell based meat went pretty quickly from, I mean, at least my world is more of a bubble but still, it went pretty quickly from, kind of Frankenstein stuff to a lot of people talking about it. And that's just education.
Michelle: [00:22:07] And I think some of its exposure in education. I also think this last year was a watershed moment for biotechnology broadly. I mean, we went from identifying a global strain of a disease to producing a vaccine and starting to vaccinate the world scientifically. We would not have been able to do that even a decade ago.
Elizabeth: [00:22:27] And the world's shifting and knowledge is getting passed around much faster than it ever has. Things that I think seem scary to people become less scary, more quickly. Do you guys have like naysayers?
Michelle: [00:22:44] Oh yeah. I think it's fear. I think we get our fair share as being an all female led company working on a women's problem, which shouldn't just be a woman's problem. Let's be clear it's a humanity problem, but very much gets assigned to Oh, well, women feed babies. So that's a woman's issue. We get a lot of pretty ignorant comments or concerns, like why does this even need to exist? Breastfeeding is going great for a lot of women. You know, in some ways, it does go beautifully for many women, and for some women, it's absolutely not even medically possible. So I think just sometimes having a little thicker skin about that, like we're working on an issue that is polarizing enough that everybody has an opinion on it. It means you're really working on a problem that needs to be solved and you're going to get some absolute lovers that come out of the woodwork that you had no idea we're going to be your strongest champions and you're going to get others who are afraid or concerned. Luckily, we live in a free country and hopefully a freer and freer world where they can express that.
Elizabeth: [00:23:42] Shouldn't this company, this industry, be run by women? I mean, but you would think it would make all the sense in the world.
Michelle: [00:23:50] I think that is the truth of where we are today at this moment. But there has not been the truth historically. Most women's health tech companies in the past have been run by men. Infant nutrition infant formula is absolutely a male dominated industry, most of whom now are older white gentlemen who haven't had kids in 50 years, even in their household, much less, in their laboratory. So I think, absolutely, one of the things we're most proud of is that our team is mostly female or very allied males, very diverse and younger, frankly, generations of people that were developing products for our own children rather than just the hypothetical children of the world.
Elizabeth: [00:24:32] What does it take? So from now, until someone can go to the grocery store and purchase bio milk? I know there's a lot of hurdles before you get there, but what are kind of like the outline of them?
Michelle: [00:24:45] So this year is very much a year of research. Really getting a very strong understanding of our model, our platform technology that we're working on, really understanding the limits and potential of different opportunities within that technology. Then we're moving now into more of the optimization. So making a product that, yep, we feel pretty comfortable. But how do you lift this lever to get this exact composition or how do we adjust this processing parameter that makes it more effective and more efficient? And that will continue for the next year or so. We're probably about 12 months from a minimum viable product, but then we're not a software company. We don't get to move fast and break things and just launch a product. That's where we're already collaborating with regulatory bodies and having in-depth discussions about how we regulate this product? How do we prove that it's safe? How do we manufacture it at a scale and a level that is safe and eventually accessible? That's one of the things I stress the most about, that we don't want this just to be a product that ends up in the hands of wealthy parents in the West and no one else in the world. So being able to design for that requires a lot of upfront thought about how you bring costs down quickly, how you increase efficiency and how you build, frankly, your financial modeling to be able to not worry so much about break even but actually worry about impact,
Elizabeth: [00:26:03] Because that's what's going to happen with a lot of the cell based meat, right? It'll start out super expensive once it's regulated.
Michelle: [00:26:10] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:26:11] And it'll take a while before it's really that accessible?
Michelle: [00:26:14] Yeah, it's actually one of the critiques I have of the sector. I'm sure all of my other co-founders in the space are like, Shut up, Michelle. We know this, but it's one of my biggest concerns. I think we're a little bit of an elitist movement right now. We tend to have a lot of scientists with PhDs from pedigreed institutions, and the average consumer wants a product that they feel is safe and understands and has a benefit for them. I think we still kind of build these products as if they're just going to be sold to Silicon Valley. Because that's where a lot of the investment comes from. So I do worry a little bit about this belief of like, Oh, well, you just scale and then it gets cheaper and then people can afford it, instead of really thinking intentionally about like, No, how do you speak to consumers where they are in different parts of the country and world? How do you build a product that has the levers to be able to be brought down to a price that can actually be sold on a store shelf where a lot of consumers are shopping? And how do we think about making gradients of products that are more accessible if we're not going to be able to launch something immediately, that's affordable?
Elizabeth: [00:27:15] What do you mean by gradients?
Michelle: [00:27:17] You know, thinking about products that could be blends or that could be components. A perfect, beautiful marbled steak is absolutely the holy grail. But what are the in betweens? You see a company just already asking kind of what are the in-betweens of how we get to something more accessible, that's maybe not a full full meat product or in our case a full milk product. I think those are really valid questions to think about. There is a population of people in this world that need to be fed, and we don't really have the luxury of time to just wait until the cost comes down.
Elizabeth: [00:27:53] Wait until enough people buy it at a high price so it can be scaled on and on and on. Right. Because the whole globe needs this, it's not even just here in the West. So the scaling got to be huge.
Michelle: [00:28:07] Yeah, got to be huge. As someone who scaled products previously on an industrial level from a tiny bench amount to these huge bioreactors and fermentation tanks, scaling is hard. So everyone's kind of like, ‘Yeah, we're just going to scale it.’ And I'm like, Oh, it's not like a straight curve here, you know, there are a lot of things we've got to learn along the way. So there's a lot of assumptions that have been made in the space that I think are pretty bold and we in general as a company are a lot more conservative as as scientists led and thinking about what we realistically want to promise to the public and want to work towards as a first first pass versus what is realistic and what we can get there. Because we absolutely would love to under-promise and overdeliver rather than the reverse in this case?
Elizabeth: [00:28:55] Right. Then ultimately, like once you are scaled, will there be a point where like a woman could actually use her own cell to create milk?
Michelle: [00:29:06] Yeah, yeah. So we get a lot of press for custom milk, which we can do today. I mean, we can do it technologically, we can take cells from a man or woman, it doesn't matter the gender and produce milk. But again, back to this question of accessibility, that's something that absolutely we can do and there's some benefits from a scaling perspective and from a consumer acceptance perspective and from a market perspective that make it a custom model really alluring. But as someone who really wants to see this product in rural Bangladesh changing the developmental outcomes of children in the world. It's not necessarily where I think our passion or heart lies, necessarily as we think about the broader vision for bio milk.
Elizabeth: [00:29:45] That's awesome. That's not the answer you hear, you know.
Michelle: [00:29:51] Don't tell my funders. Don't play this for them. But actually, they all know this already. They're always like Michelle. You remember you have to make money, right? I'm like, I know, I know we'll get there. They'll be fine.
Elizabeth: [00:29:59] It's so much more to get behind because so many parts of the world are struggling so badly in this sense.
Michelle: [00:30:08] I always like to point out when I have a hard day, one of the things I tell myself is you might be feeding the future brilliant innovator who's going to solve the next big challenge of the world. Because when you get to feed infants, you literally might be nourishing Einstein might be a bad example, but the next Einstein, right? I think it can get pretty meta to think about a technology where it's not just sending humans to Mars, although that's pretty cool too, but really thinking about evolutionarily as a human species, what potential can we reach? What can we truly unlock in our population and in people? Nutrition is the fundamental building block of a lot of what sets that early in life in that first 1000 days? To be able to participate in such an important part of the development of a person is pretty amazing and we take that responsibility pretty heavily.
Elizabeth: [00:30:59] Michelle, thank you so much for what you're doing and for today. I'm amazed.
Michelle: [00:31:05] Well thank you for having me. It's always fun to talk about these stories, and women feel so isolated in this period of their lives, this fourth trimester with their children. Yet it's a human universal experience globally to try to feed your child. So it's kind of the ultimate expression of love and a challenge that most families face in some capacity. To be able to work on something that everyone has some understanding of or empathy for, is pretty amazing as a human.
Elizabeth: [00:31:43] To learn more about Michelle and about bio milk, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we'd greatly appreciate it. Go to our website Species Unite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky and Anna Conner, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.
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As always, thank you for tuning in - we truly believe that stories have the power to change the way the world treats animals and it’s a pleasure to have you with us on this.