Mother’s Own Milk (MOM) fortification is an emerging nutritional intervention that honors the mother-baby dyad by providing biologically matched nourishment for infants with elevated metabolic demands or complex medical needs. Today, it relies heavily on parent advocacy. Ursa’s purpose is to lead a grassroots, collaborative effort to advance awareness, offer direction for operationalizing this approach for care providers, strengthen the evidence base, and facilitate ongoing research.
Ursa is the Latin word for bear—the ultimate symbol of maternal protection. In the depth of winter, a mother bear nurtures her newborn cubs by using her milk to provide the concentrated nourishment they need to survive. Inspired by this instinct, Ursa supports mothers of high-risk infants who harness the powerful deep freeze of the lyophilization process. By freeze-drying and fortifying their own breast milk, these mothers preserve and concentrate their liquid gold, protecting their fragile babies through the most vulnerable season of their lives.
The ultimate objective of the Ursa Program is to improve access to MOM-based fortification, particularly in hospital settings and institutions. While parent-led advocacy at the bedside is a necessary and powerful stepping stone, institutional adoption ensures this intervention is available to all families, not just those with the awareness or capacity to advocate for it.
We’re working to bridge the gap between promise and practice—bringing together clinicians, researchers, operational leaders, families, and other champions of this effort to help this practice transition from an early-stage idea into a reliable, universally available process that can easily and directly benefit babies and families.
This work is early, and it won’t scale without the right community. That’s where you come in.
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We’re building in the open:
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Your insights and collaboration will help ground the Ursa Program by sharing your real-world clinical and operational experience, and help shape the operational pathways for making this a safe, repeatable, and adoptable practice.
What evidence, protocols, or unanswered questions should guide this work?
How does your unit handle ordering, storage, labeling, and chain-of-custody today?
What would make your unit ready to pilot vs. what would block adoption?
Where do current MOM fortification workflows succeed, and where do they break down?
Who should we talk to next (roles, teams, or institutions), and what’s the best intro path?
What personal experiences with MOM-based fortification (or barriers to it) would you be willing to share?
We invite professionals in neonatology, lactation, clinical nutrition, nursing, and hospital administration to engage with this initiative. Our goal is to collaborate on refining clinical guidelines, establishing operational workflows, and addressing the regulatory, financial, and institutional barriers required to establish MOM-based fortification as a safe, accessible standard of care.
If you are a parent, family member, or other champion of this effort, we’d love to learn from your lived experience—stories of MOM-based fortification that helped, and/or barriers or pushback you encountered along the way.
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Learn about how Ursa came about:
The Family Behind the Ursa Program
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