SBIR Phase I: Protein isolate serum replacements for low-cost cultivated meat medium

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable a robust, scalable, and cost-effective means of cell expansion for cell-cultivated meat. Cell-cultivated meat offers an alternative source of animal meat products that may address issues of sustainability, conservation, and ethical sourcing. Current meat consumption is 30-40 kg per person per year in a population of nearly 9 billion people, presenting a major and growing annual demand for animal meat. Cell-cultivated meat, by bypassing animal slaughter through the growth of animal-derived cells in controlled environments, could help to meet this demand in a way that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, foodborne illnesses, and land and water usage. It also could offer more control in terms of metabolic profile, fat content, product sourcing, and food testing and analysis, a level of control from single cells to finished meat product. With concerns for animal meat sourcing over the next several decades, cell-cultivated meat may offer an opportunity for supplementing a shortening food supply and an alternative to traditional meat sourcing. The proposed project expands on a low-cost and highly optimized cell culture medium formulation to enable scalable production of bovine cells for cell-cultivated meat. Cell-cultivated meat expects to use orders of magnitude more growth media than any previous market demand. Even pending the inevitable advancements in high-density cell culture, medium recycling and perfusion, scale-up bioreactor design, and limiting factor replacement that will all reduce this burden, there remains a profound need for lower-bulk, lower-cost media. A challenge is that cell culture has historically relied on blood serum to provide nutrients, growth factors and proteins—the most abundant and costly of which is albumin. The goal of this work is to replace high-cost recombinant albumins with plant-sourced albumin or albumin-like proteins, enabling the affordable production of cells for cultivated meat. Recombinant albumin improves on current formulations in the proliferation of bovine cells, and plant-derived fractions derived from US agricultural waste streams can similarly improve performance. This project aims to identify the highest-performing isolates among a defined set of candidates, followed by formula optimization. The resulting medium would be a low-cost solution for the growth of cells for cultivated meat—with the potential to serve other albumin applications. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.