Maternal obesity is a major public health problem. In the United States, more than 50 per cent of pregnant women are obese at the time of conception; the comparable percentage is 22-24 per cent for Canadian women. This means that a high percentage of infants born in North America are exposed to an overweight and/or obese gestational environment and to maternal over-nutrition during lactation.

Previous research established strong associations between maternal obesity and adverse metabolic conditions (e.g., type II diabetes), alternations in growth and development where obese parents tend to produce obese children, and variations in neurological development (autism spectrum disorders and increased anxiety-like behaviors) in female and male offspring.

Breastfeeding is proposed as a solution to combat the risks of overweight/obesity in children. However, very little is known about the underlying biological mechanisms that confer this protective effect and how maternal obesity may affect the function of the bioactive compounds in breastmilk, especially the small, fat-coated vesicles known as milk exosomes that carry genetic information from mothers to their offspring.

My main objective is to characterize the role of milk exosomes as a functional regulator of early development and to characterize the cellular underpinnings of milk exosome transfer/localization. Mechanistic insights obtained from this research can be used to improve nutritional benefits of donor and formula feeding in neonates, where milk exosome-based signaling may be absent. Moreover, enrichment of formula with bioengineered milk exosomes could be used to treat a variety of metabolic syndromes and developmental complications that are associated with obesity.