Modelling human lactation to support long-term health

Dr Alecia-Jane Twigger - Group Leader

Learn more about the topic and the Team working on lactation on our Cambridge Lactation Lab website.

Keywords

Biosynthesis pathways, secretion, mammary gland, human milk, maternal health, infant health, multiomics analysis, scRNA-seq, organoids

Research Summary

The early days of life sets the scene for an individual's long-term health. Human milk provides the best source of nutritional, developmental and immune support for the infant. Therefore it is unsurprising that breastfeeding is recommended by the World Health Organisation for the first 2 years of an infant's life. Despite the clear importance of human lactation, it remains a greatly understudied area. Supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, Dr Alecia-Jane Twigger leads the Cambridge Lactation Lab across the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Pharmacology.

Working with cutting-edge scientific tools, our mission is to understand how human lactation works. We aim to identify innovative strategies to improve breastfeeding, particularly in women with low supply, to enhance the long-term health outcomes of women and children.

We collect data on human milk samples in the CAMB MOM study to enhance our laboratory-based models of human lactation. Furthermore, using computational models, we will provide greater insights into the influence of genetics, ancestry, and metabolic predispositions on milk synthesis and secretion.

Research objectives
Our research objectives are to answer the following questions:
•    What are the biosynthesis pathways involved in the synthesis and secretion of human milk?
•    What factors are necessary to render human milk organoids to produce milk?
•    Is there lactocyte cell specification to make different components of milk?
•    What is the molecular basis of low milk production?
•    What key factors influence a mammary cell to develop normally (i.e. produce milk) compared to abnormally (i.e. breast cancer).

Investigator biography

Dr Twigger began her research career with a PhD in the Human Lactation Research Group at the University of Western Australia. Securing two prestigious postdoctoral fellowships back-to-back, she moved to Dr Christina Scheel’s laboratory at the Helmholtz Centre Munich, Germany to develop a milk cell derived mammary organoid model. In 2019, she was invited to join Walid Khaled’s laboratory at the Department of Pharmacology at UoC and Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. Here she focused on understanding differences in cell states of the mammary gland in normal (lactation) or abnormal (cancer) development using single cell protein and transcriptomic technologies. For the past 3 years, she has collaborated with a large interdisciplinary team lead by Prof Greg Hannon (CRUK-CI) and Jean Abraham (Breast Unit Addenbrookes) on a Wellcome LEAP funded project to determine the molecular mechanisms of triple negative breast cancer patient response to chemotherapy. Recently, she secured the prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to start her own research group, the Cambridge Lactation Lab. The focus of the lab’s ongoing research programme is to develop models of human lactation to untangle the biosynthesis of milk to support breastfeeding and long-term health of mothers and infants.

Related links: https://www.repro.cam.ac.uk/cambridge-lactation-network