Reno Reporter

Steven Frese, an assistant professor in the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), was recently named a Foundation Early Career Innovator for his contribution to infant nutrition that has life-saving capabilities.

Necrotizing enterocolitis is a top reason for the death of premature infants and affects approximately 30,000 U.S. newborns every year, a recent UNR press release said. A liquid probiotic formula solution for premature infants has been created and has been on the market in large part due to Frese’s work.

“We were coming at it from the angle of understanding what the ecology of the gut microbiome was, and how we could leverage what we knew about that system to change it and improve it for the better,” Frese said in the release. “A lot of my work was leading the R&D team and working with my colleagues to really build a case for why this is a valuable opportunity for preterm infants.”

This award isn’t the first for Frese, as his list of accomplishments includes being a named inventor of 18 patents, holding more than 40 peer-reviewed publications and being given the Jules Tournot Award by the European Probiotics Association for his doctoral dissertation.

“I was really surprised and humbled to be nominated,” Frese said. “It was a really nice recognition for this work that myself and others have done. A huge group of people have worked on this, from the initial discoveries almost 20 years ago, all the way through to the development of the product and the commercialization.”

At first Frese was drawn to how two organisms communicate with each other, and he eventually ended up as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Davis; the release said. He was hired on by his mentors to lead research and development when they branched out to start their own company. There, Frese’s position was to grasp what the probiotic organism does for infants who are fed it, along with how the microbiome is affected.

The probiotic resulted in major reductions in necrotizing enterocolitis risk and deaths associated with the disease in infants; a May 2022 study by the Journal of Pediatrics said, quoted in the release.  

“Families went home with their kids because of the work we did,” Frese said in the release. “When I started thinking about it, I got a little choked up. To go from the basic discoveries to helping get hospitals adopt the product is a really unique [experience], and it’s one that’s been really rewarding. I get to see the full lifecycle: from discovery to impact, and that’s really rare. I feel really lucky to be able to have been a part of that.”