- New research collection: UWA’s WA Human Milk Biobank has collected more than 1,000 samples and has capacity for more than 100,000.
- Broader donor representation: Planned recruitment across Western Australia will include diverse cultural backgrounds and rural and remote communities.
- Specimen reuse: Aliquoted samples stored at −80°C will be made available to researchers by application for use across multiple studies.
The University of Western Australia (UWA) has launched a research-focused human milk biobank to expand access to biospecimens for studies of lactation, milk composition, and maternal and infant health.
The WA Human Milk Biobank, led by Professor Donna Geddes, Director of UWA’s Centre for Human Lactation Research and Translation, already holds more than 1,000 samples and has capacity for over 100,000, according to UWA’s September announcement. The university describes it as Australia’s first dedicated human milk research biobank and the third of its kind worldwide; those rankings are UWA’s claims rather than independently established comparisons.
Supported by the Stan Perron Charitable Foundation, the biobank will allow researchers to apply for samples, reducing the need for every project to recruit donors and build its own collection.
“Researchers currently have limited access to valuable longitudinal human milk samples…”
— Professor Donna Geddes, quoted in UWA’s announcement
A Research Resource, Not a Clinical Donor Milk Bank
The distinction is important. Clinical donor milk banks screen, process and distribute donated milk to feed infants, particularly vulnerable newborns. The WA Human Milk Biobank instead preserves donated specimens and associated research data for scientific investigation, rather than providing milk for infant feeding. The different purposes are reflected in the published literature on clinical donor milk banking.
By building a shared research collection, UWA aims to support investigations into milk production, its nutritional and biological components, the infant microbiome and conditions such as mastitis.
Expanding Donor Diversity and Research Metadata
The biobank plans to source specimens from women across Western Australia, including donors from different cultural backgrounds and rural and remote locations. UWA says the approach is intended to help researchers examine how diet, breastfeeding practices, geography and environmental conditions may relate to human milk composition and production.
For biobanks, representation is only part of the challenge. The interpretability of comparisons also depends on well-documented collection timing, stage of lactation, donor characteristics and other relevant variables. Such metadata can help researchers distinguish biological differences from variation introduced by how and when samples were collected.
Aliquoting and −80°C Storage Support Sample Reuse
UWA says donated milk will be divided into smaller portions and stored at −80°C so that an individual contribution can support multiple research questions. Aliquoting can also limit the need to thaw the same original specimen repeatedly, although specimen suitability must still be considered for each assay.
“We want to make sure every drop counts.”
— Professor Donna Geddes, quoted in UWA’s announcement
Human milk presents particular pre-analytical challenges: its composition can vary within a feed, throughout lactation and with the method of collection. A systematic review co-authored by Geddes found substantial variation in human milk sampling practices and reported that methods can affect measured fat and protein concentrations.
This makes consistent collection procedures, documented processing and storage histories, and appropriate quality controls central to the research value of a shared human milk biobank. The announcement identifies the storage temperature and aliquoting approach but does not set out a full specimen collection and quality-control protocol.
Future Collections Could Support Preterm Infant Research
UWA also plans to expand the resource to include milk from mothers of preterm infants. These future collections could support studies of milk production after preterm birth and the relationships between human milk nutrients, infant growth and development.
The development highlights a wider opportunity in biospecimen-enabled research: purpose-built collections can preserve scarce biological material alongside contextual data and make it available for questions beyond those considered by the original donors or investigators. Whether the WA resource achieves that potential will depend on representative recruitment, robust pre-analytical documentation and access processes that allow samples to be used responsibly across studies.
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