Prolacta Bioscience

Uh, if you wouldn't mind, take a look back, and now that you're, you've been this seasoned CFO, tell us what part of the journey helped prepare you best for that.

Uh, I think definitely working in public accounting was a huge benefit, and also my time at, at Prolacta Bioscience, as well as even the lessons you continue to learn throughout your career, and I've learned plenty of lessons at Curative too, so.

Um, I think in public accounting you really learn to be analytical.

You get to see a lot of different companies.

And I think you just learn a lot about boards and presentations and how to present what you want people to understand in a concise manner.

So I think that was really helpful.

And then, um, at Prolacta Bioscience, we're really taking a company that wasn't profitable to becoming profitable and growing it actually what we thought was very fast, which most people think is very fast, but being at Curative seems slow now.

But, um, and really the things that you need to do, you realize it's not a lot of times the, one, the great ideas.

Melinda Elliott.

She is a board-certified neonatologist and the chief medical officer of Prolacta Bioscience.

Dr. Melinda Elliott's path to neonatology began in childhood.

Even as a young girl, she knew she wanted to be a quote-unquote baby doctor.

After losing that patient profoundly impacted her and strengthened her resolve to find safer nutritional options for fragile babies.

Her clinical experience led her to research the benefit of an exclusive human milk diet, or HEMD, for extremely low birth weight infants, as well as breastfeeding practices among mothers of very low birth weight babies.

as she studied and implemented the human milk-based fortifiers from Prolacta Bioscience.

Fortifiers free of cow milk, she saw significant improvement in clinical outcomes.

One of the most powerful tools in that care may also be one of the most natural, human milk.

Today I'm joined by Dr. Melinda Elliott, a board-certified neonatologist and chief medical officer of Prolacta Bioscience, who has spent more than 30 years caring for premature infants.

As a NICU nurse, I knew this would be a great conversation because neonatologists are some of my favorite people.

In our conversation, she takes us inside the world of the NICU and clears up some of the misconceptions surrounding prematurity.

Absolutely.

It is, as you said, nutrition is medicine.

So let's go down that road, because you are the chief medical officer of Prolacta Bioscience, and I'm familiar with Prolacta, and we'll talk about why.

But when we're talking about caring for an extremely premature infant, how important is nutrition to their survival and their development?