In order to get all premature infants access to an exclusive human milk diet, we’re reimagining human milk-based products from the ground up. This starts with how we procure our milk.
“The way human milk is currently screened is contributing to the perceived human milk shortage because it does not value what women bring to the marketplace,” shared Chelly Snow, COO and Co-Founder of LactaLogics. “We wanted to shift our approach to be donor-first, reconsidering the way donor milk procurement has been done in the past.”
Rigorous donor screening is vital to the safety of our human milk-based products, but we balanced this with the emotional and physical needs of donor moms.
Through early research and interviews, we sought to understand the time and commitment it takes to provide breast milk. Milk donors typically eat more food, are intentional about taking care of their nutrition, and spend a significant amount of time cleaning pump parts, cataloging their milk, and carefully packaging their milk bags for shipping—all while taking care of a newborn.
This led us to develop our initial methodology to evaluate lifestyle, test for drugs of abuse, and test for adulteration, all while supporting the donor mom at every step of the process.
This methodology was applied to our first donor screening, reflecting a more holistic approach, while successfully providing enough donor breast milk for our first research and development (R&D) run.
“We want to help premature babies, but the only way for us to meet their needs is by first meeting the needs of donors. We made great strides in this first donor screening process, and we are already applying lessons learned for our next run,” continued Snow. “We will continue to value the work donors bring, defining what holistic care can mean for our industry.”
More details of our donor screening process will be released as we continue to validate and iteratively improve them over the next series of R&D and pilot runs.
