Proliferum M: Reinventing growth media for the cultivated meat industry.

Current animal agriculture is highly unsustainable, it is one of the biggest contributors to climate change and has a significant resource uptake. Furthermore, global meat demand continues to increase at 3% per year.

Current methods of meat production must be changed in order to prevent the impending global food crisis and hinder the further progression of climate change. The concept of reducing meat consumption in order to reduce the climate impact of agriculture has been around for a long time. Many people have decided to become flexitarian, vegetarian or vegan fueled by the success of plant-based meat replicas such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. However, many people still struggle with eliminating meat from their diet because meat consumption is a part of their culture, and thus cannot easily be changed.

Cultivated meat is the food of the future and companies are making this meat because it means we don't have to slaughter millions of animals every year to meet our growing demand for protein. It is also healthier, requiring no antibiotics and grown in a sterile environment without contaminants. But most importantly, cultivated meat is going to be one of the most powerful ways to mitigate the ongoing climate crisis. Growing meat this way releases up to 87% fewer greenhouse gases than conventional meat and uses just a fraction of the land and water.

The key challenge holding back this entire industry is the cost of feeding the cells, where over 80% of production costs come from the growth media alone. Current solutions we're never designed for the food industry, for example, animal-derived blood serum is often used in biomedical research to grow cells, which goes totally against the ethical and sustainability aspirations of the cultivated meat industry.

We are reinventing growth media specifically for the cultivated meat industry. During this Project, we will develop MediOP - a novel way to optimise growth media to achieve high performance across multiple stem cell types. MediOP will be used to develop Proliferum M - growth medium designed for growing cow and pig cells, which we test and validate with prospective customers.Through developing a replacement for expensive, animal-derived feed ingredients, our technology will shorten routes to market, lower entry barriers, and provide a collective benefit to the cultivated meat industry. But most importantly we will be accelerating the forefront of an industry that will replace the devastating impacts of livestock agriculture.