One of the key benefits of breastmilk over formula current is the immune benefits being passed from mother to child. Why is it not possible to artificially create antibodies etc and add it to formula? Formula already has the other nutritional benefits. And babies who take donated breastmilk are fine, so the immune benefits exist even if it’s not from the baby’s own mother.
In: Chemistry
As always there’s lots of people saying that the important thing is that baby gets fed. Which is great. But if we’re aiming for optimising results:
Breastfeeding has long-term benefits for your baby, lasting right into adulthood.
Any amount of breast milk has a positive effect. The longer you breastfeed, the longer the protection lasts and the greater the benefits.
Breastfeeding can help to reduce your baby’s risk of:
infections, with fewer visits to hospital as a result
diarrhoea and vomiting, with fewer visits to hospital as a result
sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)
obesity
cardiovascular disease in adulthood
Giving nothing but breast milk is recommended for about the first 6 months (26 weeks) of your baby’s life.
Health benefits of breastfeeding for mums:
Breastfeeding and making breast milk also has health benefits for you. The more you breastfeed, the greater the benefits.
Breastfeeding lowers your risk of:
breast cancer, ovarian cancer, osteoporosis (weak bones), cardiovascular disease and obesity.
The thing is that breast feeding is bespoke for each child and mother, and replicate that level of precision of each family would be cost prohibitive and probably technically impossible tbh. Most of the ingredients in formula milk would be low risk if missdosed into the formula, but once you start messing about with more complex antibiotics and the like, overdosing and damage becomes a lot more likely.
The issue is that breastmilk is tailored to the mother’s environment, diet and feedback from their baby’s saliva. It’s a feedback loop.
Breastmilk’s chemical composition will change daily based on the baby’s needs.
It’s impossible to replicate this in formula.
But it’s important to note that despite the fact breastmilk will tailor itself to the baby’s needs, formula does provide **all** the nutrients required for the healthy development of any child. It’s two different approaches to the same result.
The current cost to add just one of the antibodies to breastmilk at the same concentration is around $10k per litre. They’re insanely tricky to produce and purify.
Antibodies are extremely complex molecules, proteins that is. Insulin is an extremely simple peptide protein compared to antibodies. And it took decades to mass produce it cheaply in yeast.
They cannot just be synthesised in a chemical factory.
The only way to produce them is use genetically engineered cells. Human cells, hamster cells, E. coli or yeast.
But the different to human the cells are the more likely the antibodies themselves are going to be detected as foreign by the recipient.
That‘s because despite being provided the same genetic code for those antibodies each species attaches a signature pattern of sugar molecules to protein it creates.
So even if you could determine a blanket solution of various antibodies (since as others have written, antibody makeup varies massively between mothers depending on vierr the tally everything ) they would be extremely expensive.
Cost aside, “antibodies” are not a single discrete chemical entity. Skipping a better explanation that would trigger someone on this sub to rage about it not being amenable to actual 5 year olds, basically every antibody you have was randomly generated and happened to match a part of an foreign bacteria/virus/etc. There are additionally many subtypes of antibodies specialized for dealing with specific types of pathogens/etc in specific areas or pathogens in particular areas of the body. The antibodies in any breast milk are a hugely diverse array of different molecules recognizing most significant pathogens the mother’s immune system has encountered, as well as many natural commensal organisms (which they may actually help establish in the microbiome).
In short, it’s technically infeasible at present to identify likely thousands of different antibody clones in breast milk and work out a minimal “standard” that could be produced en masse even if there existed unlimited resources. What could work is pooling antibodies from blood donations. This is safe and common. The reason this isn’t in breast milk as it’s a limited resource given intravenously for the treatment of numerous serious immunological disorders (intravenous immunoglobulin therapy).
Also, this isn’t the only thing “missing” from formula. There are a ton of biologically active components of breast milk that definitely aren’t fully understood.
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