Laura Katz

A biotech built to make human proteins for humans

Laura Katz runs Helaina, a New York biotech company with a specific and unusual goal: to make the bioactive proteins found in human milk without a human being involved. The tool is precision fermentation, the same broad technique that has produced insulin for decades. The first product to reach the market is effera, a human lactoferrin - an immune-supporting protein - grown in yeast rather than extracted from cows. Helaina describes it as the first human-identical lactoferrin available commercially.

That distinction is the whole argument. Most lactoferrin on shelves today comes from bovine milk. Katz's bet is that a protein the human body recognizes as its own works better than one borrowed from another species. As she puts it, "human proteins for humans are more effective, efficacious, absorbable, and bioavailable than cow proteins." Helaina has raised more than $80 million to prove that out, including a $45 million Series B in 2024 aimed squarely at getting the ingredient into products people can buy.

By 2024 the company had crossed the line most biotech startups never reach. It stopped being a research project and became a business that ships an ingredient, moving from the lab into commercial manufacturing at a scale measured in millions of servings per production run.

It started on the subway

The idea did not arrive in a lab. Katz was on the subway, riding to see her brother in Brooklyn, when she heard a podcast about the black market for breast milk - people buying it from strangers online. Athletes, new parents, patients, all going to strange lengths to get at the bioactive proteins in human milk. Given how vast and varied the modern food supply is, the fact that this one thing had no good substitute struck her as a problem worth solving.

She was a food scientist by training, with a food science degree from Western University and a master's in food studies from NYU. She had spent her early career developing products for food brands, and at 14 she was already competing in Food Network-style cooking contests. In 2017 she became NYU's youngest-ever adjunct professor in Food Science and Technology, teaching students who were sometimes older than she was.

Helaina began in 2019, when Katz was 26, run out of her kitchen on the Lower East Side with little money and no investor network. Then the pandemic hit and fundraising moved to Zoom. She cold-emailed prominent investors anyway. She credits some of that early nerve to not knowing better: she was, in her words, "naive enough to not realize how difficult it was going to be."

From a broken freezer to a product line

The early years were not tidy. On a weekend in 2021, a lab freezer malfunctioned. Katz found herself on FaceTime with scientists, moving samples between freezers, and eventually breaking into the locked lab in full panic. She has told the story since as the moment she understood how much she cared - the vulnerability was the point, not the embarrassment.

Her leadership style leans on an early angel investor, Tom Williams, who pushed her to bring a team along rather than chase goals at any cost, and coached her through supporting people during the disruption of COVID. Katz talks about setting an even tone at the top: "Don't ride the highs and don't ride the lows. I am responsible for setting the tone for Helaina." She meditates to keep that steadiness when the work gets loud.

The mission has crept into her own family. Her mother takes 250mg of effera lactoferrin a day. When Katz talks about dosing and iron metabolism, she cites guidance from her hematologist sister-in-law. This is not a founder describing a product from a distance.

The rules she works by

A timeline

• 2017Becomes NYU's youngest-ever adjunct professor in Food Science & Technology.
• 2019Founds Helaina in New York City, working out of her Lower East Side kitchen.
• 2021Named to Forbes 30 Under 30, Food & Drink, at 29.
• 2024Helaina moves from R&D to a commercial ingredient company and launches effera.
• 2024Closes a $45M Series B, pushing total funding past $80M.

Beyond the first protein

Lactoferrin is the opening move, not the whole game. Katz wants precision fermentation to make a range of human-identical bioactive proteins accessible to far more people, with applications reaching from immunity to women's health and athletic performance. The broader ambition is a shift in what food is expected to do - less reliance on pills, more nutrition that carries real biological function. Helaina has advanced a partnership with Nestle to push that idea toward the mainstream.

She is candid that the terrain is uneven. Women founders receive a small fraction of venture capital, face sharper judgment for missteps, and field skepticism about age that male peers rarely hear. Katz has raised her money and shipped her product inside that reality, one email and one production run at a time.