Standardising food safety testing for the cultivated meat industry: feasibility study to accelerate innovation

With the global population projected to approach 10 billion by 2050, the demand for food is increasing. Alternative protein sources, including cultivated meat and seafood, can play a critical role in meeting this demand while reducing the environmental impact of intensive animal agriculture.

Multus is a leader in the development of animal-free culture media ingredients. High-quality, cost-effective growth media is essential for the commercialisation of cultivated meat production. However, a barrier to commercial production and public and regulatory acceptance is the lack of standardised safety assessment methods and publicly available data supporting the safe use of these media components in food.

Cell culture media is made up of components that allow cells to grow. Most are already naturally present in our foods; however, some have not previously been used as food ingredients and have not been evaluated for safety as processing aids or food additives. An industry goal is to remove any animal-derived components, such as serum, based on ethical and safety concerns. This requires the use of recombinant proteins. These can exhibit bioactive properties and require a novel approach to safety evaluation not yet established for food ingredients.

Multus and its partners Dr. Ruth Wonfor at Aberystwyth University, cultivated meat developers Extracellular, and outreach coordinator Endorphin Capital will collectively develop methods to demonstrate the safety of media components and also coordinate multi-stakeholder outreach, including established standards bodies, and information dissemination on open access platforms for the benefit of all stakeholders and companies.

The first aim of this project is to develop and substantiate methods to evaluate the safety of media components, with a focus on novel and bioactive substances. Multus and its partners will refine and validate several _in silico_ and _in vitro_ (animal-free) testing methods and disseminate this work publicly. There are few peer-reviewed publications on the safety evaluation of cultivated meat inputs. Method development has occurred within industry, but little information has been published. This project will engage multiple stakeholder groups to provide insight into the validity of the methods from industry, governmental, societal and academic perspectives. The overall goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of multi-stakeholder collaborations to develop widely accepted methods for safety evaluation of serum-free culture media ingredients and then to apply this model to other safety aspects of cultivated meat production.