Technion scientist Assaf Zinger began wondering about breast milk when his wife, Noa, was breastfeeding their newborn daughter, Tamara, five years ago.

His wife had just received the COVID vaccine, and Tamara was starting to develop symptoms of the vaccine.

“I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, nanoparticles should degrade in the stomach,” Zinger told The Times of Israel in a teleconference call. “They should not be absorbed in the small intestine.”

After two years of research, Zinger said he believes that his team of 16 scientists is the first in the world to show that breast milk proteins can be used to protect and deliver nanoparticles so that people will be able to receive their medication — not by injecting it but by drinking it.

“The study shows that human breast milk proteins can be used for drug delivery purposes, and as far as we know, nobody’s done this before,” Zinger said enthusiastically. “One day, we will walk down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, go into a Starbucks coffee shop, and order a pumpkin spice cappuccino with hormones, vaccines, or chemotherapy.”

The research, led by Dr. Zinger’s PhD students Si Naftaly, Rawan Mhajne, and undergraduate student Topaz Pery from the Wolfson Department of Chemical Engineering, as well as Prof. Maya Davidovich-Pinhas and Dr. Areen Ashkar, both from the Technion’s Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering.

The article appeared in the peer-reviewed Journal of Controlled Release.

Zinger said the research continued even though he served as an officer in the armored corps of the IDF for........

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