Perrin and her team plan to use computer modeling to see how milk banks can reduce this variation during the production process. They plan to wrap up and publish this work in spring.

“This study is important because it is going to establish a very rich reference value for what we can expect the nutrients in donor milk to be. It’s a first step,” Perrin says. 

“If we know what’s in donor milk, we can think about how we might change our feeding protocol – such as adding fortifiers to donor milk, to better meet premature infants’ nutritional needs.”

Donated milk is collected by milk banks for processing and distribution. Perrin is active in policy efforts to promote safe practices in donor milk banking.

In 2022, she was tapped to be one of 16 members of the World Health Organization’s Guideline Development Group for establishing and implementing safe and quality human milk banking systems. Perrin, the only U.S. researcher in the group, serves as its co-chair. 

By creating consistent standards for milk banking, the global group is helping ensure babies most in need of donor milk receive it safely.

“This is a population that didn’t exist 30 years ago – babies that were born around 24 weeks didn’t survive,” Perrin says. “There’s so much work to be done.”