Denise Ney is a Professor at UW-Madison in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and she’s kept very busy while being there. For the past 15 years, she’s been studying a protein found in sweet cheese whey called Glycomacropeptide (GMP). Going back to the beginning, Ney was invited to do research on GMP by some dietitians and physicians at the Waisman Center in Madison. They wanted her to help them bring to life the idea of making GMP a dietary supplement for people with a rare genetic disease called Phenylketonuria (PKU).
First of all, PKU is a genetically inherited disease that’s transferred to the baby if both parents carry one gene for the disease. Even though the parents carry the disease, they don’t have it themselves. The other tricky part is that you aren’t able to tell if the baby has it unless they get tested at birth, which the U.S. has been doing for a while now. Ney said that in Wisconsin we have five or six babies born each year with the disease. “The stakes are very high because when the baby’s born, they look completely normal. You can’t tell by looking at them,” Ney said.
If a baby isn’t tested at birth and gets fed a normal diet like breast milk or formula, they’ll develop severe brain damage within weeks. This is where GMP comes into play because it doesn’t have any of the essential amino acids Phenylalanine, which is the amino acid that people with PKU can’t handle. That’s what makes GMP the perfect protein to use in order to make foods for people with PKU.
Once she figured out the power of GMP, they tested it on mice to see how the study would go before being able to use GMP foods on humans that have PKU. Fast-forward and the tests were successful, they were able to create foods with GMP, and they’re on the market now in multiple places. “There is a patent that I filed with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). I signed over the patent rights to the University and they marketed it and it was licensed in 2010,” Ney said.
She also mentioned that after the licensing stage, a company called Ajinomoto Cambrooke successfully brought it to market and now there are other major companies selling GMP medical foods for those with PKU including Vitaflo USA, and Nutritia. She said that these companies are making it easier for people living with PKU to have as normal of a life as possible.
“I’ve been invited to speak all over the world, so I’ve spoken with the families, I’ve spoken with the scientists, I’ve spoken with the clinicians,” Ney admits though, “I really like speaking with the families. They get it.”
Thanks to Ney, her research, and the dairy industry, there are lives being changed all around the world. Ney recognizes how much of a major role dairy plays in GMP medical foods. She thanked the dairy farmers because one critical piece of the research that went on over the years was creating foods that were made out of GMP and the Center for Dairy Research helped her out with that. She needed the foods and the data from the mice to get accepted for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, which is what made the patent possible.
Ney talked about how her research on GMP and PKU has now lead her down a new path with GMP and weight loss. During their studies, they found that the mice who were fed GMP had less body fat, oxidized more fat, and had less inflammation than the mice that were given another protein called Casein. She’s currently working with a grant from the Dairy Innovation Hub to study the antiobesity impacts of the GMP protein. Ney said there’s also some evidence that GMP could help those who suffer from Crohn’s disease.
It’s safe to say that GMP could be the answer many have been looking for. The protein helps change the lives of those with PKU, could in fact help with obesity, and possibly could help people with Crohn’s disease. All of the benefits GMP has to offer are great, and the best part is that without dairy, it wouldn’t be possible.
Listen to the full interview with Professor Denise Ney here.
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