(upbeat music)
- Before I start talking about COVID-19,
I'm giving you a little bit of an introduction
of what MOMI CORE is all about,
why we're looking to human milk for new answers.
So I start with this sentence here
to introduce you to the topic,
and it says that the death of 823,000 children
and 20,000 mothers each year could be averted
through universal breastfeeding.
And that comes along with an economic savings
of about $300 billion every year.
This is from the Lancet breastfeeding series 2016
and it really opened many questions.
what is in human milk that makes it so powerful
and can be potentially exploit that and harness that power
of human milk to develop new treatments and therapeutics.
So just to give you one example here,
human milk is saving lives,
every single day we're still losing
about 2200 children under the age of five
to diarrheal disease every single day.
On the other hand, we know that children
who are breastfed have substantially lower risks
to suffer and die from infectious diseases
including diarrhea,
but also infectious respiratory diseases.
So what is in human milk that makes it so powerful?
And it's not just the immediate benefit
for the breastfed child
at that very moment of breastfeeding,
there is really benefits for life.
We know that infants that are breastfed
have a lower risk for overweight and obesity
later on in life.
There's a lower risk for diabetes as well.
And we know that children that are breastfed
have a higher IQ and higher earning potential
even after correcting for other socio economic factors.
So again, what is in human milk that makes it so powerful
to have these long lasting effects?
It's not just good for the breastfed infant.
It's also good for the breastfeeding mother.
We see that women who breastfeed
have a lower risk for diabetes,
have a lower risk for cardiovascular disease,
and are also at lower risk
to develop breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
And the question remains
what is in human milk
that makes it so powerful to save lives?
And really, there's opportunities
for people of all Ages.
If we look at the current health statistics,
we lose about 18 million people every year
to cardiovascular disease.
So that's your heart attack and stroke.
1.3 million people suffer
from rheumatoid arthritis in the US alone.
And I mentioned already the infants
that we lose to diarrheal disease,
it's predicted that we lose about 10 million people
to infectious superbugs by the year 2050.
One in five children develop obesity,
422 million People suffer from diabetes.
About 3 million people in the US alone
have inflammatory bowel disease.
And one in eight women will develop breast cancer.
So we really have a world in crisis
even before this pandemic was striking.
So what do we do?
We need answers, we need to find solution
for all these health problems, and if we need answers,
We often go to the chemical labs, develop new drugs,
develop vaccines develop all kinds of remedies.
And that's really the traditional way
of finding answers to some of these diseases.
All most of these drugs though,
come with many, many side effects.
These are mostly compounds
the human body is not exposed to
and triggers adverse effects accordingly.
So what have we been looking to the right answers
and all the wrong places?
What if we look to human milk for new answers instead?
And go the non traditional way that UCSD is really paving.
This is all in the space of prevention,
diagnostic and treatment.
So we're really working in the space
of what's called DOHaD Developmental Origins of Health
and Disease, meaning that what happens
in the very early phases during pregnancy and lactation,
breastfeeding determines your trajectories later on in life,
and really all the way over to improving longevity.
While we are in the School of Medicine,
this is not just a medical issue,
this is a public health issue,
really a global public health issue.
And not only this, there is certain other facets
in this kind of research
that really hit some of the key points.
So for example, this is a question of gender equity.
Women are often left alone with this breastfeeding issue.
Right, breastfeeding, it's a women's issue.
It's not it's a society issue.
If we don't protect, promote and support women to breastfeed
society will suffer from this greatly.
This is also a racial equity issue.
We see that many of the diseases
that I mentioned before
minorities are more affected,
obesity comes to mind as a great example.
But also, minority women are less likely to breastfeed.
So you get a double hit here
and we need to address these inequities as well.
And last but not least,
comes a little bit of surprise maybe,
but this is also a question
of environment and climate change.
Imagine the footprint the carbon footprint
that is associated with not breastfeeding
with producing infant formula
and supplying that to about half the population
about 50% of the population
of the infant population is currently not breastfed.
This is what MOMI CORE is all about,
it's not just a health issue,
it's really a society issue.
Why do we study human milk now
in this pandemic Coronavirus crisis
So there's multiple different questions to this.
First of all, we need to make sure,
that if we have a mom that is infected with this virus
that the virus is not present human milk
and is then transferred
to the infant and infects the infant.
So, the question is,
can a baby get infected through breastfeeding?
And if that's the case,
then we need to know that we need to guide
and support parents and healthcare providers accordingly.
On the other hand, is it possible that there is components
in human milk that can stop the virus?
So for example, we know there's antibodies in human milk
when mom gets exposed, she develops antibodies
and this is not just the case for Coronavirus,
this is the case for many other diseases
so she develops antibodies,
those antibodies are handed over to the child
through breast milk, and then the child is protected.
So is that the case in coronavirus.
There's also other components
in human milk that are independent
of whether the mom was exposed before or not
one example is oligosaccharides that my lab is working on
that's specifically block certain pathogens,
whether it's bacteria or viruses,
and that's where we can use those as antimicrobial entities,
this antimicrobial peptides and many other things.
So again, we need to know all these different things
to guide and support parents
and healthcare providers to make the right decisions.
But most importantly, can we take that knowledge?
Can we extract antibodies?
Can we extract and synthesize all your saccharides
for examples or peptides to make available
as a new treatment option against this Coronavirus?
So what we really wanna do is to stop the pandemic
by developing new antivirals to prevent or treat COVID-19.
What would success look like in this space?
Well, first of all, we wanna have parents
that are confident to breastfeed.
So we need to have accurate information
not only developed but also communicated to the public.
We need to make sure that health care Providers
make recommendations that are based on evidence and science
and not just based out of fear.
So that is very key, we need data
and the data needs to drive recommendations.
And last but not least,
we wanna have Novel and safe antivirals
to prevent and treat COVID-19.
And really contribute to the arsenal
of potential vaccine so we can use against this new virus.
And it's very important
that this is not just crisis management,
we need to make sure that not only if another virus hits,
but when the next virus hits that we are ready.
Okay, what does this all take?
Well, it takes expertise,
and we none of us really has all the expertise
to answer all these questions.
So we need to work together, we need to work as a team,
multidisciplinary team across silos
and across boundaries here.
And in this case, we're working very closely
with our San Diego center for AIDS research.
We're also working with colleagues at UCLA,
we have what we call MOMMY'S MILK here at UCSD
a bio repository where women sent milk sample through
and then we can analyze those very important
to do that as well.
And of course it takes resources.
It takes emergency resources,
we are very fortunate to have a partner in Switzerland,
the family loss and Rehnquist Foundation,
who originally donated over $10 million to start MOMI CORE.
And that was about three years ago.
And now, they literally made emergency funding
available for Coronavirus research overnight,
we called them up at night and we said, you know,
we really need to do this research
the next morning, we had an email in the inbox
Yep, here is the first hundred thousand dollars
to get you started.
And we also received a very generous
personal donation out of the community
that also goes into this kind of research
and we're very thankful
for those private philanthropists as well.
Alright, so back to where we started,
life and death in parallel to the COVID- 19 pandemic,
all these issues they're not going away.
They're happening in parallel,
we're losing Losing people left and right
to all these different diseases
people are suffering.
And this is our common goal for MOMI CORE
is to take a non traditional approach
to take a look at human milk to find new answers
for all these different diseases,
but really make this MILK MOONSHOT not about health only.
This is really a society issue,
and where could we do this better than at UC San Diego,
where we do non traditional things,
and where we work together.
We don't have silos and we break down barriers
and come together and tackle these huge questions together.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)