Designing the future of cultivated meat
In order to make cellular agriculture financially viable, raw material costs need to be reduced. Stem cell culture medias are commercially available; however they can be very expensive, may contain components unsuitable for food production, and often rely on the use of animal serum such as Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS). Furthermore, the re-programming and stem cell guidance technologies used at Uncommon Bio are impractical with current commercial delivery systems.
These challenges have driven their Media Development Group to take a ground-up approach, using the statistical toolset known as Design of Experiments (DoE) to drive the development of cost effective and animal free iPSC culture media, and the formulation of in-house RNA delivery systems.
Despite having no previous experience with these technologies, the team have successfully developed a variety of scaled down 3D culture models, integrating high-throughput liquid handling and image analysis workflows including the THUNDER Imager 3D Cell Culture system, and AI-based machine-learning workflows within Aivia software.
With the ability to rapidly formulate and quantify thousands of parallel conditions, the team have identified key interactions and eliminated redundant components. The result is a 1000x reduction in media costs and the development of novel, efficient and scaleable RNA delivery systems.
This work exemplifies the cutting edge research that smaller teams can achieve when high-throughput liquid handling and image analysis is applied to DoE methodologies, allowing them to untangle the complex network of interactions that underpin cellular biology.
