Many businesses are finding success by focusing on the social issues impacting society today. And, in that context, the lack of nutritional assistance for preterm infants is one area that entrepreneur Elena Tagger Medo has selected as her area of focus.
Related: How the Loss of a Child Sparked This Former Tech Exec to Start His Own Business
The reason is the significant need that an estimated 15 million pre-term infants around the world (preterm, or premature, meaning born before 37 weeks’ gestation) have because they lack access to nutritious human breast milk.
Hospitals have been struggling to help these babies but have had to ration donor milk, providing it only to the smallest, sickest babies. Such rationing has meant a shortage of what infants in neonatal invensive care need most: mother’s milk.
This is why entrepreneur Elena Tagger Medo not only founded Medolac Laboratories but founded it as a public benefit corporation, which fits with her philosophy of how a social impact company should look. Medolac “banks” donor milk, which can be stored at room temperature and shipped in 4-ounce sterile packets to locations around the world.
A public-benefit corporation, created by the state of Delaware, views profits as a means to fuel growth in social impact, as well as to generate attractive returns for stockholders.
As Medo told me during a recent interview: “We couldn’t work this hard just for money; we really want to change things for the better. When Delaware made it possible to convert to a public benefit corporation, we jumped at the chance and got a unanimous vote from our shareholders to do so.”
She explained that her company is still a for-profit, C-corporation but with one important difference: “Our board of directors and management are able to consider the social impact of our decisions and act accordingly,” she said. “It was also a really great way to communicate our commitment to doing the right thing and making the world better for the tiny babies we serve.”
Babies in need
Medo told me about the emotional impact she felt the first time she saw a pre-term infant, after raising four full-term healthy babies herself. She told me she’d attended funerals for preterm infants who may have died needlessly.
She also told me about the motivation she’d received from the parents of these babies, who, she said, have had the courage to stay optimistic, visit the hospital daily or even several times a day and learn everything they can about the complex world of neonatal intensive care.
Infant formula was the standard nutrition source in hospital neonatal units for many years, Medo explained. But, starting in 1990, research increasingly connected infant formula with the increased incidence of infection and death in preterm infants.
In fact, the second leading killer of preterm infants is the intestinal infection, necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC. Given NEC’s high fatality rate, babies who survive this infection often retain only a fraction of their digestive tract, making their lives difficult and expensive. The average cost of one NEC death is $3.5 million (Published data AAP).
The earlier babies are born, the more fragile they are and the more at risk they are for NEC.
A story from the neonatal battlefront
Medo described the start of her commitment, in the form of a letter from a neonatologist telling her how a preterm baby in her hospital had died that morning. The doctor wrote that the baby’s mother’s own milk supply had faltered and that the infant no longer qualified for donor milk because she weighed more than the allowable maximum to qualify.
“She was expected to go home…