The strategic innovation collaboration seeks to better understand new bioactive proteins and how they impact early-life development and lead to specific health benefits.
“Infant nutrition is an important validation point for that work, as it holds ingredients to the highest evidence bar,” said Laura Katz, founder and CEO of Helaina. “Our broader vision remains centered on expanding access to human bioactive proteins across every life stage. This collaboration is a meaningful step toward that vision, and we are approaching it the way we approach all of our work: led by science.”
Helaina was founded to recreate the vital nutrients found in breast milk and make them accessible to everyone. Over the past few decades, lipids and sugars, particularly human milk oligosaccharides, have meaningfully advanced infant nutrition.
The next opportunity is proteins, and bringing the bioactive proteins found in human milk into infant nutrition is the logical next step in continuing to drive innovation, with lactoferrin among the most significant of those proteins, Katz said.
Harnessing emerging tech for transformation
Nestlé has spent more than three decades researching human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) and bioactives for nutrition in the early stages of life.
“Nestlé has always been at the forefront of advancing scientific knowledge on key nutrients and bioactives that are important during early life, including their interactions with the gut microbiome and the immune system,” said Isabelle Bureau‑Franz, head of the Nestlé Product Technology Center for Nutrition & Health, in a statement.
“Collaborations with external partners, such as Helaina, form an integral part of our broader open innovation strategy to deepen scientific understanding in this field, while gaining access to emerging technologies.”
Nathan Cooper, founder and managing partner at Barrel Ventures, said the venture capital firm invested in Helaina five years ago when there was no roadmap for what the biotechnology company was trying to build.
“Seeing Laura Katz and team announce a partnership with Nestlé to develop infant formula containing human-identical proteins is an incredible milestone, and validation of years of scientific innovation, persistence and execution,” he shared on LinkedIn following the announcement. “This partnership represents the start of what I believe will be one of the transformational food companies of this generation.”
A highly pure and functional protein
Katz founded Helaina in 2019 as the first company to offer an ingredient with the immunity properties of breast milk, not just applied for early years but for all stages of life.
By 2024, the startup had raised $38 million to provide “functional compounds inspired by the body’s natural intelligence.” That year, Helaina introduced effera, a human-identical lactoferrin, to the market.
Effera is made in the same manner the pharmaceutical industry develops human insulin: by teaching a specific strain of yeast to produce a protein of interest during fermentation. Helaina introduces the yeast to human DNA that, along with the fermentation process, expresses effera. The product is a highly pure and functional protein.
Bioactive proteins like lactoferrin perform specific roles in the body, supporting iron balance, immune function, gut health and more. The challenge has always been supply: The human versions are concentrated in breast milk, and the cow-derived alternative is a structurally different protein, sharing only about 70% sequence homology with the human form and in short supply, Katz explained.
“Precision fermentation now makes it possible for us to produce a human-identical version at commercial scale, with consistency and clinical credibility,” she said. “That combination, the right biology and a reliable supply chain for producing it, is what makes this a significant innovation for nutrition today.”
