Elena Medo

Overview

Elena has been a market innovator in the field of human milk for over 25 years. She is the founder and CEO of Neolac, Inc., her second startup in the field of human milk-based nutrition, formulated to meet the needs of extremely premature infants. She first became interested in the medical value of human milk when nursing her own children. As the field of neonatology advanced and more preterm babies began to survive, she began creating and executing strategies to ensure that sick babies would receive their mother's milk. Realizing that mother's milk was routinely being fortified with cow's milk formula in neonatal units and that there were documented poor outcomes for this practice, Elena formed the first company in the world to formulate human milk to a consistent standard for medically fragile babies. For the smallest babies, born up to sixteen weeks early, she developed and commercialized the first concentrated human milk formulation designed to be added to mother's milk to deliver the requisite amount of protein required for optimal growth and brain development. She initiated the first large randomized clinical trial to study the impact of an exclusively human milk-fed diet for such babies. The results of the study have driven an increased demand for the medical use of human milk because of a documented decrease in illness and death among the breastmilk fed group. She established the first virtual milk banking system, allowing donors to provide milk regardless of their geographic location and successfully scaled the volume of raw milk from qualified donors. She is now working to assure that all preterm babies worldwide are given acess to lifesaving human milk formulations, regardless of their location or ability to pay. Many of the world's fifteen million preterm babies born each year are transported to hospitals far from home and away from their mothers, leaving them without human milk and vulnerable to infection and death. Neolac has developed human milk for