Health psychology Professor Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook and incoming grad student Jessica Marino have a new study suggesting that the breastmilk of mothers who have recovered from COVID-19 contains strong antibodies to the virus.
In the fight against the global pandemic, there is an urgent need to identify factors such as SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies in milk that may help confer immunity, particularly for vulnerable newborns, the researchers said.
Because human milk contains high levels of these secretory-type antibodies, breastfeeding by mothers who recover from COVID-19 could pass on immunity to babies, and there’s a chance the purified milk antibodies could be a therapy for adults suffering from COVID-19.
Hahn-Holbrook’s research focuses on breastfeeding and Marino, who graduated from UC Merced with a degree in psychology in 2016, has been the driver of this project. As a graduate student in the Health Psychology Ph.D. program, Marino concentrates on the development and expression of maternal behavior. She plans to study how hormones affect maternal behavior and the intergenerational effects that mother-child relationships can have on health. Her ultimate goal is to find protective maternal factors that might mitigate health risks in vulnerable children.
Marino and Hahn-Holbrook, with the Department of Psychological Sciences, answered a series of questions about their breastmilk-antibody study:
What was the original research question you asked? Did you already know that breast milk contained SARS antibodies?
When moms get sick, breast milk sometimes contains antibodies to help infants fight off that particular disease. Antibodies help your immune system recognize and destroy pathogens like COVID-19. But COVID-19 is a completely new disease, so, before we did this study, no one knew whether breast milk from mothers who recovered from COVID-19 would contain antibodies. Perhaps more importantly, we also wanted to do this first study of COVID-19-specific antibodies in milk to see exactly the type of COVID-19 antibodies that are present, because some types of antibodies provide more powerful protection than others.
Were you surprised at the results?
We were happy but not surprised to see that all mothers who recovered from COVID-19 had antibodies for COVID-19 in their breast milk. This is good news because it opens the door to using breast milk from COVID-19-recovered mothers to treat critically ill babies or prevent severe illness in vulnerable infants. While our small study of 15 moms only gives us a snapshot of what is likely a dynamic immune response, it provides good reason to continue exploring the power of human milk to treat or prevent COVID-19 in infants. We were also pleased but not surprised to find high levels of a special type of antibody in milk called sIgA, which is especially good at fighting diseases that attack the lung lining such as COVID-19.
One thing that surprised us was that we found immune compounds that responded to COVID-19 even in the milk of mothers in our control group who were never infected with COVID-19. This suggests that breast milk may have some general immune properties that help babies fight COVID-19, even if mothers have never been infected with the disease.
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December 15, 2020 at 02:52AM
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