Mother's Milk is Best

Mother’s Milk is Best’s mission is to bring more of the benefits of their mother's own milk to preterm babies. We developed a medical device that will revolutionize neonatal feeding by concentrating a mother's own milk at point of care. Our device concentrates human milk and will make the current practice of feeding cows milk fortifiers to premature babies obsolete. The HMC device will be the first FDA evaluated medical device that optimizes human milk on the market. Each year 1 in 10 babies born in the US are premature. They have immature organs that cannot process the relatively large volumes of milk necessary for growth. Milk is typically fortified to provide nutrient rich feedings in low volumes to be fed to the infant. Those fortifiers reduce the amount of mother’s own milk and/or donor human milk the baby is fed and can increase the risk of life-threatening illness. The most widely used milk fortifier contains cow’s milk which can threaten a neonate’s digestive health and significantly increase the risk of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a disease with up to 30% mortality rate. MMIB has developed a point of care human milk concentration device that increases the ability to use mother’s own milk instead of other fortification processes. The human milk concentration device was conceptualized by CEO Beth Schinkel, a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit nurse with a background in clinical nutrition. Our device utilizes a mature technology that has been successfully used for water filtration for decades and mimics the way plants draw water for growth. MMIB prototype designs were developed in consultation with NICU professionals and membrane engineers. Studies published in Journal of Perinatology conclude that "the osmotic concentration of HM is a promising option for neonatal nutrition. Further studies are needed to establish an evidence base for the practical applications of this point-of-care device."