Breast-feeding provides optimum nutrition for babies and it’s likely that nothing will ever be able to completely replace breast milk. However, scientists may have formulated a potentially comparable alternative to breast milk by using human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) to mimic breast milk’s most important benefits.

Breast-fed babies develop a unique microbiome, or collection of beneficial bacteria, and the HMOs in breast milk are thought to be the optimum food for this microbiome. Drawing on over 20 years of clinical research, Dr. Buck and her nutrition research team have devised an infant formula that harnesses the unique qualities of HMOs to improve the food source of a non-breast-fed baby’s microbiome.