High costs and limited supply of growth factors for cell culture media

Context

From the Good Food Institute (GFI):

Cultivating animal cells outside of the body requires a suitable cell culture medium that contains the oxygen, nutrients, and other factors needed for cell growth...

Cell culture media is currently the largest cost and environmental impact driver for cultivated meat production. The vast majority of current media costs and a sizable fraction of environmental impacts are incurred by the second group of added media components: growth factors and recombinant proteins (Vergeer, Sinke, and Odegard 2021; Sinke, Vergeer, and Odegard 2021; Specht 2018). These added components serve a variety of critical functions in metabolism, transport and delivery of nutrients and other macromolecules, and control of cellular activities (see nomenclature for this report), making them difficult to replace in the serum-free media formulations expected to be used in the cultivated meat industry. Thus, efforts to lower the costs and environmental impacts of the production of growth factors and other recombinant proteins are needed.¹

And from an expert on the cellular agriculture market:

"Growth factors are one of the key bottlenecks but really the entire formulation pipeline needs to be massively scaled up." - Akhil Jalan, 2024-09-06

Nonprofits working to address this bottleneck

• The Good Food Institute (GFI)

• Trends in cultivated meat scale-up and bioprocessing
• Deep dive: Cultivated meat cell culture media
• Anticipated growth factor costs and volumes