Yali Bio achieves first yeast-based human breast milk fat

In South San Francisco, scientists at a food tech startup called Yali Bio have produced a critical component of human breast milk using engineered yeast.

According to the World Health Organization, most of the 130 million babies born annually are fed infant formula at least some of the time. The innovation from Yali will enable infant formulas that more closely match the nutrition of human breast milk.

To create the fat, the Yali Bio researchers used precision fermentation to coax yeast into producing the human bioidentical fat. Specifically, they produced a fat called 1,3-dioleoyl-2-palmitoyl-glycerol or 1,3-dioleolyl-2-palmitate. This fat is naturally found in high concentrations in breast milk and helps infants absorb nutrients.  Currently, OPO is one of the key nutritional differences between breast milk and infant formula, as there is no economical source of pure OPO available to the producers of formula. Instead, formulas today rely on fats from vegetable oils or cow’s milk, neither of which contains optimal levels of OPO.

The breakthrough was made possible with a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.