The peculiar prospect of a pharmaceutical milkshake could be closer to reality following new research into the digestion of milk.
Professor Ben Boyd, from the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, says new understandings of how milk is digested could lead to a raft of pharmaceutical innovations.
“You could envisage pharmaceutical products where you don’t have to take a horrible tasting tablet,” said Professor Boyd.
“You just have a shake of flavoured milk and drink that and that enables the drug to be absorbed just as well or better.”
Professor Boyd says to date, little has been known about just how milk is digested.
“We know that milk is made up of fat droplets and they are dispersed in water.
“Science has known that for a long time, but science hasn’t known what actually happens to those droplets during that process of digestion,” he said.
“If we can understand digestion of fats, that are the main part of milk, then we can apply that into [pharmaceuticals].”
Professor Boyd says there is a ‘natural synergy’ between the dairy and pharmaceutical industries, and harnessing greater information about milk digestion could lead to a growth of new products and industries.
“In the case where people have trouble ingesting fats in milk, that is where these findings might allow us to think about what we might put into foods to enable them to better handle that sort of a product,” said Professor Boyd.
“We can then start to design systems that would allow better digestion of these foods or better dissolve nutrients, vitamins or drugs.
“That could then lead to new products in the milk industry and eventually, whole new lines of industry.”
While he stresses such research would not necessarily be relevant to lactose intolerance, Professor Boyd says exploiting the body’s natural ability to break down and absorb fats is a focus of modern pharmaceuticals and one the dairy industry could play a big role in.
“It’s a strange analogy, but if you eat a Big Mac then you’re taking 30 grams of fat and your body has a mechanism of breaking that down and absorbing it within an hour or so, so it is a really efficient mechanism,” he said.
“A lot of pharmaceutical drugs are not soluble in water but they are soluble in those fats, so we can piggy-back off that natural process of absorbing vitamins and nutrients and use that to better design systems that allow us to absorb drugs.
“Milk is a natural vehicle for that.”