Originally published August 9 2005
U.S. firm says it will market breast milk
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A U.S. firm has announced that it wants to buy breast milk and then sell it to hospitals for the treatment of sick babies.
Breast has long been best when itcomes to feeding babies but a California company this week launched the first known venture to commercialize human donor breast milk and develop its use for sick children.
"Human milk has 100,000 different components and we onlyreally know what a few thousand of them are and what they do,"Elena Medo, CEO of Prolacta Bioscience, said on Wednesday.
Human breast milk, with its combination of minerals,digestive enzymes and antibodies, has long been credited withkeeping babies healthier and boosting their intelligence.
But until now breast milk donation has largely beenconfined to altruistic mothers and a handful of nonprofit milkbanks that collect milk on a local basis and provide it topremature and sick infants whose mothers cannot nurse theirnewborns themselves.
Prolacta Bioscience has opened what it bills as the firstlarge-scale centralized facility for processing donor breastmilk in the United States.
The small start-up company in Monrovia, 15 miles west ofLos Angeles, is also thought to be the first with a mission tomaximize the properties of human milk for pharmaceutical use.
Prolacta will first use its facility to buy donated breastmilk from independent milk banks and hospitals across theUnited States, pasteurize it at its Monrovia plants and sell itback to hospitals to treat very-low-birth-weight babies.
Its next market will be babies with heart defects who needsurgery and are at risk for infection, and then children withcancer and those undergoing chemotherapy who suffer very upsetstomachs.
Medo also hopes to develop human-milk-based therapies totreat necrotizing enterocolitis, a gastrointestinal diseasethat is one of the leading killers of premature babies.
Prolacta's mission has disturbed traditional breast milkdonor organizations in the United States, which have beenproviding neonatal-intensive care units since 1943.
It said introducing the profit motive might pressure womenand medical institutions to provide milk to a bank regardlessof the needs of their own babies.
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