2024 Canada Gairdner Momentum Award Laureate, Dr. Meghan Azad, is a professor of Pediatrics and Child Health at the University of Manitoba, a research scientist at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba, co-director of the Manitoba Interdisciplinary Lactation Centre (MILC), and a Canada Research Chair in early nutrition and the developmental origins of health and disease. Dr. Azad’s Gairdner award was granted for her research on understanding how human milk contributes to shaping the infant microbiome and lifelong health.

Dr. Azad’s team studies chestfeeding, infant nutrition, and child and infant health.

Carly Weeks, in an article for the Globe and Mail on April 11th, interviewed Dr. Azad about her study of human milk. “This is the one and only food that has evolved to feed human beings,” said Dr. Azad… “It’s kind of wild to me that we know so little about it, relatively speaking.”

In 2020, Dr. Azad was awarded a $6.5-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to

establish the International Milk Composition Consortium with the aim of understanding the various components of breast milk and how they interact. In a video about her work at https://www.gairdner.org/winner/meghan-azad, Dr. Azad notes that, “historically, women’s health broadly, and lactation and breastfeeding specifically, has really not been adequately researched, adequately funded, adequately taught in medical school”, which means having the Gairdner Award “recognize research in this area … does a lot for this field as well”.

The Globe and Mail article gives an outline of Dr. Azad’s current research work:

To get an objective understanding of the impact breast milk has on infants and children, Dr. Azad is focused on the microbiome – the collection of trillions of microorganisms that play a multitude of important roles throughout the body, including disease prevention – and how breastfeeding affects it.

She is collaborating on the CHILD study, a major research initiative that began recruiting pregnant women in 2009 in Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Toronto and continues to follow their children today. Investigators regularly collect samples, including blood, breast milk and urine, and conduct questionnaires and in-home visits to help answer questions about how early exposures – to a particular environment, diet or illness, for example – can affect health later on.

Dr. Azad said it quickly became clear that breastfeeding is one of the defining factors of the infant microbiome. Some of the study’s findings include new evidence about the preventive role breastfeeding plays against asthma and that pumping milk may cause some of its bioactive components to degrade in storage.

Now, she is continuing that work and trying to answer fundamental questions about the composition of breast milk, the role it plays in health and how that knowledge could be applied to help support breastfeeding policies.