To fulfill our mission, we support and contribute to various projects.

Researcher Dr. Tim de Meij, Pediatrician for Gastrointestinal illnesses at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) of Emma Children's Hospital at the Amsterdam University Medical Center (AUMC) will run this multi-center research project. A study about the influence of early microbiome colonization, antibiotic exposure and nutrition during prematurity on the health in later childhood. The research study will include over 3000 preterm infants in 9 NICUs across the country.

Nutrition in the first phase of a baby has a huge impact: fewer infections, less incidence of NEC, faster on full enteral nutrition. In collaboration with SANQUIN, the Dutch blood bank, Emma Children's Hospital at the Amsterdam UMC organizes a breastmilk bank to enable mothers who cannot breastfeed their baby themselves, to still give all the benefits of breastmilk to their babies. Donors are screened (medication/diet/smoking/alcohol/drugs etc). Donor milk is always traceable from donor to recipient and vice versa. The "liquid gold" costs EUR 318 per liter, which translates to EUR 48 per day for a child of 1 kg. Help us feed 25 babies for 15 days!

Our next project for the new Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of Emma Children's Hospital at the Amsterdam University Medical Center (AUMC): Screen2Screen, a wonderful way for parents of babies who are in the NICU to stay in touch wherever they are - by camera monitoring in the incubator, straight to their smartphones. A great way for parents, brothers, sisters, family, friends to stay involved in the care of the baby. The camera also enables temperature checks via infrared.

Our new ambitious project for 2021 is to sponsor a "mother&baby private intensive care unit" at the Intensive Care division of the Emma Children's hospital in Amsterdam, which is currently being built. This will allow sick mothers and their prematurely born babies to share a room - rather than staying in two different parts of the hospital (as was the case with Birgit and Sophie).  Due to the specialist medical equipment needed, these units are expensive. Please help us to raise the EUR 40,000 needed for one unit. Update April 2022: Thanks to additional donations (not done through the website), we have been able to pay for the entire unit! Please check the blog for an update about the opening of "Sophie's Room".

Project UNIEK has been started by the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of the VUmc academic hospital, to further improve the care of premature babies. We are happy to support this project by donating specific items, such as "kangaroo" chairs, "froggie" positioning aids, incubator covers, cooling bags for mother milk, etc.

For 2020, our goal is to sponsor the pilot phase of a joint research project between AUMC/VUmc and Harvard Medical School about the microbiome (intestine) of prematurely born babies. The goal of the study is to determine how nutrition during the baby’s time in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) can be improved to support the development of the baby's immune system in the gut. Dutch Ph.D. student Alexandra Calor has started to work on the pilot under the supervision of Prof. Van Weissenbruch, and will move to Boston to the research lab of Dr. Stefania Senger, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School as soon as corona-guidelines allow.