Coster has found a way to produce lactoferrin, the nutrient found in breast milk that boosts immunity, but has proved difficult to replicate. 

But she is aiming high.

“I see us being a global player when it comes to providing highly functional and high-quality nutritional ingredients. Eclipse can be one of the world’s leading suppliers of nutritional ingredients,” she said when she won the judges’ award at the UQ Ventures ilab pitch night earlier this year.

Succeeding would mean disrupting a market of about $US1.4 billion ($A2 billion).

Eclipse is expected to go to the market next year looking for investment funds, but at the moment it is in incubation with the CSIRO where scientists and commercialisation experts are helping Coster develop the product.

There are plenty of hurdles ahead including scaling up and regulatory approval as well as where to start production.

“At the moment we would love to do it in Queensland but the capability exists mainly in NSW. However, there are a lot of talks with the Government and CSIRO about building capability. That (a Queensland base) would be ideal but it is still to be determined,’’ she said.

The market currently relies on a process using expensive cows’ milk which uses 10,000 litres to make a kilogram of lactoferrin which sells on the market for $1500 a kilogram.

“We are using this awesome technology called precision fermentation. It’s been around for a number of decades and used predominantly in the pharmaceutical space (they use it to create insulin),’’ she said.

“We take the DNA of the nutrient we want to make and we put that into a yeast cell which is put into a big fermenter and we add feedstock like sugarcane to help it grow and multiply and then as it grows it expresses the protein or nutrient we want and then we use purification and separation to ensure we end up with the target nutrient.’’

The baby formula market is what she calls the “north star’’ for Eclipse and the “wonder nutrient” she has developed. 

“That’s where we feel we will be able to make the biggest impact because there are a lot of infants that are being formula fed and missing out on this important nutrient,’’ she said

“It is in very short supply.

“The goal is that as we achieve economies of scale we decrease the price of the ingredients we are making so we can increase accessibility.

“We are already in development. We are in R&D laboratory stage and we are aiming for a commercial product in 2024.

“It is deep tech, but we have already started.”

Her goal is to create one tonne of lactoferrin in the first year of sales.

“We need to scale up our processes from pilot to pre-commercial scale and we also need to obtain regulatory approval and cement our first product,’’ she said.

The Asian market was an area of high demand.

Lactoferrin could also be used in sports nutrition because it has an iron-binding function which allows oxygen to move around the body. It also has an anti-microbial and anti-viral function. 

“It has a compound growth rate of around 12.6 and around $US1.4 billion market value by 2028,’’ Coster said.

“But the one limiting factor of that is it’s only looking at bovine lactoferrin and that’s where I feel like we can disrupt that market even further especially if we are able to provide a lower cost, more price effective point.’’

“We are aiming to spin it out at the end of this year or early next year.”