PFx Biotech's EIC Accelerator Brews Human Milk Protein

Lactoferrin is one of the proteins a mother's milk uses to regulate iron, strengthen the gut and fight bacteria, and the infant formula industry buys it from cow's milk. That is inefficient and inexact: about 50 litres of cow's milk per gram of lactoferrin, with a footprint of roughly 50kg of CO2 equivalent, and cow milk proteins can differ from their human counterparts by up to 40% of their amino acid sequence, which the project says may affect bioactivity, digestibility and allergenicity. PFx Biotech, founded in Porto in 2022, puts the human gene into a microbial strain and ferments the protein instead.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, HuMiLAF, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance under the challenge for food from precision fermentation and algae, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,999 from May 2025 to April 2027, split between the Portuguese company and a Belgian entity. The work is to scale human milk lactoferrin from the laboratory to pre-industrial volumes, validate it in infant formula and immunity shots, win regulatory approval and sign major customers.

A company that started with one child

The company's own account of its origin is personal: Ali Osman's newborn son reacted to cow milk protein, and the search for an alternative became the business. PFx completed the EIT Food Seedbed incubator in December 2023, joined the EIT Food Accelerator Network in April 2024, and in May 2025 won the most innovative nutraceutical ingredient category at the Vitafoods Europe startup challenge.

Its technology is standard precision fermentation applied to an unusually valuable protein: genetic information for the human protein goes into proprietary microbial strains, which are grown in bioreactors on water, sugar and nutrients and secrete the protein, which is then purified. The company says the result is structurally and functionally identical to the protein in breast milk.

€9.5 million announced, €5 million confirmed

The EIC award was reported in February 2025 by UPTEC and the IASP as €9.5 million, which combines the grant with conditional EIC Fund equity; CORDIS records the grant of €2.5 million, and no equity investment has been announced. In June 2025 the company closed a €2.5 million equity round led by Buenavista Equity Partners with EIT Food and Beta Capital, bringing total funding to €5 million, Green Queen reported, for laboratory facilities, a larger team and the pre-industrial scale-up of lactoferrin. "This is a defining moment for PFx Biotech," CEO Ali Osman said.

R&D director Diana Oliveira described the near-term priority plainly: "our focus now is on the large-scale production of our first human milk protein, lactoferrin". No production volume, customer or price has been published since.

1. Human milk lactoferrin producedLab scale, per companyPlatform described and awarded; no volumes published.
2. Pre-industrial scale-upFundedThe central aim of the EIC project and the 2025 round.
3. Novel food approvalNot filed publiclyCompetitors hold clearances in the US and China; PFx has announced none.
4. Agreements with major customersNone announcedNamed as a project goal.

Approval is the whole race

For a fermented human protein going into infant formula, the binding constraint is not the bioreactor but the regulator. In the EU this means novel food authorisation from the Commission on an EFSA opinion, a process measured in years, and the company's own project lists regulatory approvals as a deliverable rather than an achievement. Green Queen notes that the only companies with clearance for animal-free lactoferrin so far are American and Chinese, which is the gap the EIC is funding PFx to close for Europe.

Infant formula is a European export industry

Europe is a major exporter of infant formula, and lactoferrin is one of its premium ingredients, sold at prices the sector feels. Making it by fermentation would cut both the cost and the dependence on dairy supply chains, and doing it with the human rather than the bovine protein is the differentiator PFx is betting on. The EIC's precision fermentation challenge exists to put European companies into a field where the first approvals have gone elsewhere.