About the InfantRisk Center
The InfantRisk Center (IRC), based at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics in Amarillo, is a globally recognized call center dedicated to supporting healthcare professionals and mothers worldwide.
Physicians, nurses, lactation consultants, and mothers from all corners of the globe rely on the IRC. Each call typically involves questions about multiple medications, with an average of 3-4 drugs per inquiry. Our primary goal is to assist mothers, lactation consultants, and doctors in assessing the risk of infant exposure to these medications while encouraging continued breastfeeding.
Our staff members will tell you that this call center is a true labor of love. We work tirelessly to address complex and often unprecedented issues faced by our callers. Despite the challenges, we consistently find ways to help mothers access the necessary medications during pregnancy or while breastfeeding.
Years ago we realized that no one was doing drug research in breastfeeding mothers, and that it was ultimately up to us to do this research. Since 2013, we’ve published more than 25 drug studies, and we have a dozen more under development right now. But there is so much more that we need to understand about human milk, and we are rapidly entering this field with projects involving human oncogenes in milk, and human endocannabinoids in human milk. With funding, we could open an entirely new endeavor to understand the endocrinology of human milk, and how our endocrine system controls milk production.
Some of our newest goals are:
- Develop new research on the transmission of newly released drugs into human milk.
- Develop new research on the transmission of Cannabis products into human milk.
- Develop new research on the endocannabinoids found in human milk. What are they doing there?
- Train new physicians and pharmacists in Breastfeeding Medicine.
- Train medical, pharmacy and nursing students in Breastfeeding Medicine.
- Develop a new set of training video modules for healthcare professionals.
- Increase the number of calls we can support from moms and healthcare providers.
- Help more moms to continue breastfeeding safely.
The InfantRisk Center operates a highly sophisticated set of Clinical Pharmacology laboratories with the most up-to-date technologies including Mass spectrometry and numerous new biological and Elisa tests. We have dozens of projects underway which include all aspects of breastfeeding pharmacology, molecular medicine and genetics. We are consistently publishing data on new drugs each year and studying many aspects of lactation, including a new study to detect cancer antigens present in human milk. We have a new study to try and determine why some women have high prolactin levels, but can't make milk. Is it an unusual prolactin molecule? Maybe.
We have recently started a whole series of studies on the presence of endogenous CB1 receptor stimulants (the endocannabinoids), with some startling results we will present in the new few months.
We are helping pharmaceutical firms to breastfeeding research on their new drugs, so we can get the data on such drugs and council moms about their safety. Finally, the pharmaceutical industry is interested in studying the transmission of their drugs into human milk.