Cellular agriculture: formulating growth media for cultured meat production
At the start of this quarter, CPI successfully completed a project working with 3D Bio-Tissues, formulating growth media for cultured meat production. Cellular agriculture involves creating animal-based products from cell culture, rather than directly from animals. With traditional meat production accounting for 57% of all food-production-related greenhouse gases, cellular agriculture offers a solution for meeting the growing consumer demand for meat alternatives that are both ethical and sustainable.
To develop cultured meat, a growth medium is needed. Traditional growth media contains fetal bovine serum that’s produced from blood taken from foetuses in pregnant cows during slaughter. This poses a barrier to mass-produced cultured meat being truly animal- and slaughter-free. Additionally, this growth media ingredient for culturing animal cells is expensive, meaning it’s financially challenging to scale-up cultured meat production; therefore, hindering its potential as an affordable food source.
To help develop a novel, cost-effective, and ethical growth medium for cultured meat production, CPI worked with 3D Bio-Tissues, a biotech start-up and spin-out from Newcastle University that produces bio-equivalent tissues for clinical and cellular agriculture.
A high throughput screening platform was developed using CPI’s robot liquid handling systems to identify suitable macromolecules that boosted cell growth, increased cultured meat yields, and reduced time to creating a growth media product ready for the commercial market
The growth media supplements developed by 3D Bio-Tissues will also be more cost-effective than media containing fetal bovine serum, meaning the cultured meat industry could benefit from considerably lower manufacturing costs and increased productivity, whilst removing the need for animal-based supplements.
By working with CPI, 3D Bio-Tissues has been able to create an optimised, animal-free, and cost-effective growth media product. This innovation will help lab-grown meat to become a truly viable, ethical, and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional resource-intensive meat production.
Read more here - https://www.uk-cpi.com/case-studies/3d-bio-tissues
Alternative proteins are a sustainable option for both personal and planetary health. It takes 3.5% of a population to drive a societal change – could that be you? Kris Wadrop (CPI’s General Manager of Commercial Operations) explores five types of alternative protein that are providing sustainable alternatives to traditional mass meat production:
1. Plant-based meat
2. Alternative livestock feed
3. Alternative animal proteins
4. Engineered animal proteins
5. Cultured meat