#326 - BabyLat – Custom Human Milk Fortifiers from Mother’s Milk

Hello friends 👋

This week on Tech Tuesday, Ben and Daphna speak with Dr. Zina Yudina, founder and CEO of BabyLat, a Swiss startup building a novel device to help hospitals create fortifier directly from a mother’s own milk!

Zina shares how the idea began as a way to support working mothers with limited maternity leave, but quickly evolved into a system for concentrating and fortifying human milk for preterm and very low birth weight infants. The BabyLat device uses pressure-driven ultrafiltration to preserve the natural components of human milk while boosting its nutritional value, all in a compact unit designed for hospital use.

The conversation covers how hospitals might implement the tool, how much time is currently spent fortifying feeds manually, and how BabyLat fits into the larger movement toward 100% human milk-based nutrition. Zina also discusses the challenges of raising support for neonatal innovations, and how clinical teams can get involved in early research and pilot use.

It’s a practical look at the future of personalized milk preparation—and what it might take to make it a new standard of care.

Link to episode on youtube: https://youtu.be/TPaURrghnts

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Short Bio: Dr. Zina Yudina is a molecular biologist and protein biochemist with over 15 years of experience in translational medicine. She holds a PhD in Pharmacy and has contributed to several peer-reviewed publications and patent applications.  

Born in Murmansk, Russia, in 1980, Dr. Yudina earned her B.Sc. in Biology before pursuing advanced studies and research across Europe and the United States.  Her scientific expertise spans molecular biology, biochemistry, and pharmacology. 

In 2020, she founded Babylat AG in Bern, Switzerland, where she serves as CEO. The company developed a compact, automated device that enriches human milk with protein and fat, aiming to improve nutrition for preterm infants without relying on cow’s milk-based additives. This innovation supports hospitals in providing 100% human milk-based diets for neonates.  

Dr. Yudina’s inspiration for Babylat stemmed from her personal experience balancing motherhood and a demanding research career. Recognizing the challenges working mothers face in maintaining breastfeeding, she envisioned a solution to extend the benefits of human milk. This vision evolved into Babylat’s mission to enhance neonatal nutrition through personalized, human milk-based fortification. 

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The transcript of today's episode can be found below 👇

Ben Courchia, MD (00:01.023)

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Incubator podcast. We are back today with a new episode of Tech Tuesday. Daphna, good morning. We are joined today by a special guest coming to us from Sweden, Zina, Yudhina Zina from Switzerland. my God. So it's a funny story. Let's just start right there. I heard Sweden from the beginning, and so maybe I missed a...

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (00:08.603)

Good morning.

Zina Yudina (00:17.432)

Switzerland.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (00:18.427)

Switzerland.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (00:22.539)

And I know you're very good at geography, Ben.

Ben Courchia, MD (00:27.989)

It's a funny story because obviously I'm from Europe, so I know very well that these are very two different countries. we had Pia Wintermark who came to speak to us at Delphi and she mentioned in her talk, in her introduction that she is from Switzerland and somehow she also said, which is not Sweden, so don't confuse the two. And I found that very funny. And here I am making the exact mistake. So I apologize, Ina. Welcome to the show.

Zina Yudina (00:46.21)

Mm.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (00:51.578)

Maybe.

Zina Yudina (00:57.314)

Wonderful. Thank you very much, Ben and Daphne, for your kind introduction and invite. Actually, Ben, you have something right. I'm originally from Fennoscandia. It's north of Russia, Murmansk, above Polar Circle, where I stayed 20 years of my life. Then I moved down, firstly Moscow, then Europe, and after also in United States.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (01:07.315)

Ha

Zina Yudina (01:21.25)

But now we are in Switzerland and it's a Swiss startup.

Ben Courchia, MD (01:23.561)

You're only picking nice places, I see. You only decide to live in beautiful places. That's a nice choice. you are the founder and CEO of BabyLat, a new device that is aimed to improve preterm nutrition. It's a lot of the people in the community. We talk to a lot of people and...

Zina Yudina (01:27.062)

Yeah.

Zina Yudina (01:31.636)

Yes, thank you.

Zina Yudina (01:38.445)

Yes.

Ben Courchia, MD (01:49.385)

There's some buzz going around about BabyLat. think people are excited. Can you tell us a little bit, what is BabyLat and what problem are you trying to solve?

Zina Yudina (01:55.063)

it's

Yeah, sure. And again, a huge pleasure to hear that people are talking about us. It's already a very good sign and I hope they're talking positive. So baby luck.

Ben Courchia, MD (02:07.415)

They are. They are. can reassure you. They are talking positively about it.

Zina Yudina (02:11.202)

Wonderful, yeah, yeah, and that's actually my general feeling when I meet people. Maybe it's already biased. If they willing to meet us, they're already super positive and supportive to this idea, but they're usually very much enthusiastic about an idea, approach, and what is it about shortly. We want to give to preterm babies, especially with very low birth weight, a chance to use 100 % human milk-based diet at any hospital.

How we do it, we want to a device and hospitals use milk, which they collect locally from mama of this baby or donor milk if not available first and enrich this milk and make fortifiers by their own on-site device basically.

Ben Courchia, MD (02:54.857)

Wow, that's so that's kind of incredible. So basically giving institutions the opportunity to create their own human milk fortifiers based on the human milk of either donor milk that they collected from the donor milk bank or more, I think, in a more cool fashion from the same from the parent of that baby. And so basically have a baby receive their mother's milk. And for these parents where they are fortunate enough that

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (03:14.053)

Mm-hmm.

Ben Courchia, MD (03:23.475)

They are the parents where the nurses say, we have tons of milk. You might be able to take that a bit of that excess and create your own fortifier. That is so impressive. How did you come up with this idea?

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (03:30.491)

Very cool.

Zina Yudina (03:33.486)

Thank you for again making it very nice and positive. In reality, we meet sometimes also saying, don't have milk at all, but let's don't talk about these hospitals now. How I came to this idea, I wanted to have a futuristic approach, firstly for any working mama who has professional activity and very short maternity leave and method, a device to concentrate your milk at home.

Ben Courchia, MD (03:38.388)

Ha ha.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (03:44.603)

Mr.

Zina Yudina (04:01.28)

And then when breastfeeding would be reduced, she would have in her freezer a very short volume, small samples of very concentrated milk. That idea didn't fly. It's too much for tourists. We don't know if she needs or not. But when I was talking with neonatologist that was almost seven years ago already, I was giving a very nice direction, proteome nutrition. And I was never, ever informed even.

about this topic. I was never told about pre-term babies and the problem is protein deficiency. But when I started to study this topic, I was amazed and I was convinced that it should be better than cow meal-based fortifiers. now we are in a big mess of is it really better or it's just a market now who push hospitals and society. We as a scientist

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (04:50.609)

Mm.

Zina Yudina (04:57.038)

still believe that if it's 100 % human milk-based diet, it should be beneficial and much more protective than milk mixed with something else.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (05:09.275)

love that. think this is so cool. mean, even just to have a commercial product where we can even measure what's going on in the milk we have, right? Like it's hard for us, say in the States, very few hospitals are even able to really understand the nutritional components of the milk they already have. So, okay, we'd be able to do that, step one. And then you're taking it a step further saying, now you know what the components are and how can we concentrate it? And like,

what kind of parameters, what kind of milk modifications can you make? I heard protein, but tell us a little bit about those specifics.

Zina Yudina (05:49.922)

Wonderful, so again, I want to have several answers immediately in parallel to be provided. Firstly, I was concentrated only on proteins because they are most famous for the immunoprotective effects. And if you are talking about necrotizing enterocolites or some other morbidities, it's mostly proteins who jump to our head. I want to say that you still don't know so much about protective effect of fat, for example. Maybe...

They are super important, just it's super difficult to work with and make it in labs as models. So in general, once we start to talk with doctors, they say keep fat as well. What they are all be sure that we don't need carbohydrates and that there is a point if you make after this fortifier having everything like, for example, freeze drying method, it would have extra amount which is not welcomed.

Plus, some of carbohydrates are even difficult for digestion. If we are talking about lactose, for example, do we really need it a lot and be extra fortified? We don't think so. So after a lot of discussions, we shaped our vision better and we kept only protein and fat as the most relevant macronutrients for enrichment. Then it was even easier as a task because we didn't need to remove, firstly, fat and enrich only proteins.

And now it looks like a single step ultra filtration method. When you just push by air milk through the filter, you remove by the squeezing water molecules and all other small size molecules, and you keep all what is high, let's say 10 kilo Dalton. That's our pore size. And that's basically everything, starting from protein, fat, cells, microbiota of milk, whatever you want.

Ben Courchia, MD (07:39.029)

How successful have you been at achieving your goal? Meaning when you're trying to fortify human milk and you're saying, hey, we want to actually get that formulation, or we want to get that much protein, and so on, how accurate and how successful is BabyLat in getting to those numbers? Or is there some error? Or is there always a component that, there could be

potentially plus minus 5%. I don't know, something like that. I'm just saying those numbers.

Zina Yudina (08:11.22)

Yeah, that's actually not so far away from reality. We always unspecifically lose some amount of protein. Luckily, it's much less. It's 1 % up to 5%. It depends if milk was pasteurized or not before. Because obviously once it's pasteurized, proteins start to be partially defolded and they become a little bit less natural and start to be easier to...

Ben Courchia, MD (08:30.589)

Mm-hmm.

Zina Yudina (08:33.87)

make aggregates and stuff like that, but still this difference is really, really small. And for fat, it's around 5%. And I think it's unspecific binding to the wall and filter surface as well. All the rest we manage efficiently, catch and increase in concentration because what we do, we basically remove water. And when you say we target something, in reality, if you want to be super flexible, what you know, that human milk is highly individual by composition.

30 % of fat variation, 10-20 % of protein variation. If you don't discuss here, ProTerm and Torme-Other milk, which can be up to 3.5. What it means in reality that to implement something similar to manufacturer-labeled product, you would never ever be there because it's physically not possible. But we want to give to doctor a freedom to decide what he wants to achieve today.

And it's basically like a coffee machine where you can make a latte, cappuccino, ristretto, espresso. Yes.

Ben Courchia, MD (09:35.957)

Ha

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (09:38.353)

Love that.

Ben Courchia, MD (09:39.541)

And so that's what I was going to ask you. I am not, I like gadgets, but I'm wondering like, how big is this device or is this something that you've designed where, like you said, is it like a coffee size machine? Is it much bigger? Does it need like its own room? And is it something that you're planning to market in a way that hospitals can use them for one unit and all their patients, or is it something that they're going to have to get for like individual patients?

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (09:45.531)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Zina Yudina (10:09.966)

So it's slightly larger than coffee machine, it's not so huge. Basically, after a call, we can go downstairs and I will show you if you want. It's 60 centimeters tall and it's 40 centimeters broad. So it's really compact. And don't forget.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (10:19.729)

You

Ben Courchia, MD (10:25.845)

it's not too big, yeah. What is that, Daphne, in US non-metric? Is it like what, three feet by three feet or something?

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (10:27.035)

Yeah.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (10:31.121)

We have to put the cash in. But yeah, it's not big at all. I think we can make space for that, right? That's right, much bigger things in the unit.

Ben Courchia, MD (10:39.721)

We have much bigger things in the unit.

Zina Yudina (10:44.366)

Don't forget air under pressure, but it's again a question which you're solving successfully using third-party service which provides you gas under pressure from certified providers. That's an important compound and we don't provide it. You order it on place.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (11:00.017)

Mm-hmm.

Zina Yudina (11:01.344)

another extra size of course to be for a costed. Why we say it will be universal because you ask if it's individual usage or universal, of course it's economically unreasonable if you say you have roughly five babies by five devices from us. We can now for a code that we provide you two filtration unit that's a contact area surface where you put milk and only one device. The process to concentrate zero five liters

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (11:14.651)

Mm-hmm.

Zina Yudina (11:30.606)

to 70 milliliters of very highly concentrated fraction where you increase concentration of protein and fat by factor of seven because it's direct correlation how much you reduce and you can multiply this by a factor of seven if you reduce by a factor of seven. It's roughly five daily dosage. It takes 48 hours maximum.

If it's torn milk, it's faster because it has less fat. If it's pre-torn mother milk, it's usually more complex. And it's inside of the 48 period, but it's always keep in mind that you have four degrees. coming back, it's highly unreasonable to buy five devices and do it in parallel and making it every day. We say for one baby, you prepare five daily doses.

In parallel, you clean another filtration unit and if you want to be rigorous, we recommend even auto-cleaving, then you are for sure to prevent any transmission. All other contact surface materials are single-use, filter, single-use, air under pressure, passing single-use air filter. Then what's happened next, you keep it in freezer as a liquid of your fortifiers for next five days for this particular baby. Once operation is finished,

Ben Courchia, MD (12:36.041)

Mm-hmm.

Zina Yudina (12:51.246)

you start operation for a new baby. It again takes 48 hours. You have five daily doses for these babies. So in theory, this device is constantly used. And if it's large size hospital, can maybe still recommend to buy two devices.

Ben Courchia, MD (13:07.578)

And you've been able to pilot the device in hospitals at this point or?

Zina Yudina (13:14.51)

We have a lot of interested hospitals who want to do it in Europe as well as in United States, but it's not so attractive for investors as a topic, a niche market product, as a completely risky novel approach which has no precedence on state of art. That disattracts a lot of investors who are chasing for much more common science, also areas of medicine.

Neonatologists consider to be one of the most neglected ones.

Ben Courchia, MD (13:45.172)

It's a story of neonatology altogether. I mean, think that there's never going to be enough premature babies to attract these venture firms to pour big money in neonatology. That's always a shame.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (13:46.545)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Zina Yudina (13:58.35)

So it's basically an opportunity for us today to have this call for action. Please, any interested hospitals, if you know grounds where we can apply to support such studies, approach us. We would be more than happy.

Ben Courchia, MD (14:09.174)

Mm-hmm. And yeah.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (14:13.569)

I was going to ask a question about, once a unit has it, how easy is it to teach the staff to do this process and to make the calculations and what sort of staff will they need to keep things running?

Zina Yudina (14:34.014)

Exactly. So I think nowadays anyway they spend as I was told roughly half of the day just to make this weight of cow milk fortifiers and properly mixing them with human milk to prevent that there no pellets formed. And it's still of course a little bit more commitment but in reality cleaning and washing of device would be pretty easy. All operational enrichment cycle is happening autonomously. You don't need...

check it will control all parameters itself and stop it when it's reaching target volume. Only one thing what is inside and we discuss it, quickly mentioning that now we know human milk analyzing how to do it and what we do it's the next we provide you small fabric to produce such fortifiers so you need measure it very possibly.

We know a lot of state-of-the-art devices based on middle infrared spectroscopy, for example, which you can buy from third parties, so-called human milk analyzers. We have our own device also that was done thanks to Grant Wewong two years ago in parallel. It's UV-based spectroscopy method where we can measure protein and fat concentration. That device like accessor, accessor, that's a secondary device.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (15:53.051)

Yeah, accessories, yeah.

Zina Yudina (15:53.196)

We can provide the hospital and say, please, if you want to be sure what you have in our fortifier today, measure it. Then we can give them simple. For now, it looks like Excel table, but in future it would be software. Put these numbers, put weight of baby, his volume, and we calculate the ratio of our today fortifier and today human milk, how it should be diluted.

to provide recommended protein, fat, and energy amounts per kilo per day. That's not so difficult if we ignore step of analyzing of milk. Nowadays, it's heavily ignored as well. And we met sometimes approach when they say, OK, we can still use standardized fortification also in case of our fortifiers, but a risk of fat variation which might be 30%.

We need still additionally to discuss it, how hospitals will feel about it. We still recommend to measure it. Then for five days, they know roughly the ratio of dilution. And it's five days, you don't need to it daily, basically. would be maybe slightly more amount of time than current state of heart.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (17:07.377)

Yeah.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (17:11.089)

Yeah, I was going to say, mean, it seems complicated, but I think if, for example, most neonatologists are not involved in the making of the milk or the fortifying of the milk in their unit, and if you're not, then you don't recognize how much time is being spent doing that every single day, either by the nurses or by a milk tech. And it's a lot of time that, you know, man hours that are going into that step. So very interesting. I like that a lot.

Zina Yudina (17:25.728)

All right. All right.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (17:41.099)

And you told us a little bit about the funding. You're working on getting more funding. You have some, I mean, working prototypes, obviously, and doing some studies on those. What's the best way for people to get involved, to reach you and learn more?

Zina Yudina (18:05.216)

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for this great question. In our webpage, babylut.com, we have an email for contact info at babylut.com. Then by this email, it's easy to approach me. They can also see myself by my name and approach me in LinkedIn. I always answer pretty quickly. The team is very small and efficient basically with me. We have only three more people actively involved in this company.

and they are helping to fundraise most of the time. still for small startups. As us, it's activity number one. And honestly, I would wish to run much more studies than just this very important activity, because it's exciting. opens a lot of doors for new potential, studies, for example, to approach raw milk. Wouldn't it be wonderful, like in Norway?

I'm sure that a lot of articles showing no differences with human milk derived for T5 versus bovine one are done because these human milk fractions are already super heavily processed. Instead, we are the freshest one. I'm sure we would have a lot of interesting data there.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (19:13.253)

Mm-hmm.

Ben Courchia, MD (19:16.28)

I think this will resonate tremendously, I think, with the community of parents who have critically ill newborns in the NICU. I think that for many parents, like you said, a bit to close the loop a little bit of it, like you said in the beginning of the episode, not just so much to try to create a ranking or even to...

compare notes, but just so that parents actually have options and say, OK, what are my options? What can I choose from? Because I think that what we're learning, like you said in the beginning, we're learning that every family is in a different situation. I think that maybe some parents are going to be in Sweden, Norway, in one of these Nordic countries where maybe parents have a lot of

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (19:43.653)

Mm-hmm.

Ben Courchia, MD (20:03.477)

help when it comes to maternity leave and paternal leave and maybe they'll be able to provide a lot of breast milk or maybe they'll be in the US where there's a very short maternity stay and they have to go back to work sooner and they may not have so much breast milk and so the situation is different but irrespective of it, I think it'd be nice for parents to have options to choose from and I think that's what hospitals are really looking to offer families today. I think that hospitals are able to get good outcomes and the next step is obviously to offer

options and say you're going to have we can can tailor the care to what you have envisioned. So I think I think this is where I think this is where it might resonate tremendously for the people who are interested in learning more about Babylat. It's very straightforward. Number one, you could just Google Babylat or you could go straight to their website, babylat.com. It's called B-A-B-Y-L-A-T dot com. And there you will find more information about Babylat. You'll find more information about

the solutions it's providing and obviously contact information for the team at Babyland. So, Zina, we really appreciate you taking the time to be on our podcast and to share with us this incredible new tool. We wish you all the success and we'll leave some contact information in the show notes for people to reach out to you.

Zina Yudina (21:19.662)

Thank you very much, Ben. It was huge pleasure. Thank you, Daphne, as well. It was great to see you. And hopefully we meet one day.

Ben Courchia, MD (21:21.183)

Thank you, Zina.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau, MD (21:25.762)

Our pleasure. Yeah, very exciting. We're looking forward to seeing what's next for Baby Let.

Ben Courchia, MD (21:27.527)

Yeah, I agree. Thank you.