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!

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.