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Multus Biotechnology Raises $9.5m Series A To Build Growth Media Production Plant

by Michael Wolf
January 16, 2023January 16, 2023Filed under:
  • Alternative Protein
  • News
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Multus Biotechnology, a UK-based startup, has announced the close of a $9.5 million Series A investment round to build a growth media production facility. The funding includes an equity-free grant of $2.5 million from Innovate UK through the EIC Accelerator. The round was led by Mandi Ventures, with key investors including SOSV, Big Idea Ventures, SynBioVen, and Asahi Kasei Corp.

With new funding in hand, Multus plans to build a growth media production plant in the UK that it hopes will accelerate the cultivated meat industry towards price parity with affordable food-safe growth media at commercial scale. The London-based startup will also accelerate product development in advanced growth media formulations and food-grade raw materials. This week’s funding follows a $2.2 million raise in 2021 and the launch of the company’s first product, Proliferum® M, an all-in-one solution to eliminate the use of foetal bovine serum in cell culture.

Last week, the Spoon discussed the new funding round and the company’s plans with Multus CEO and cofounder Cai Linton.

Tell us about Multus platform.

“At Multus we combine novel ingredient discovery with intelligent formulation design to create high performance growth media suited for the cellular agriculture industry. For example, we use precision fermentation and computational protein design to make growth factors affordable and unlock capabilities in growth media design.”

Like many in this space, Multus is focused on creating animal-free growth media. Tell us about your thinking here and how your platform gets there

Growth factors have historically been a leading cost-driver in serum-free growth media. Another area we are investing heavily is nutrient-rich plant-derived ingredients that are food-safe, affordable and scalable using well-established food-manufacturing practices. These complex ingredients allow us to design high-performance growth media for a variety of cultivated meat-relevant cell types with no animal serum and a clear route to scale. To capture the complexity of a large ingredient library and new cell types and performance objectives, we combine machine learning with high-throughput formulation screening to optimise our growth media efficiently in our MediOp platform.

How did the Multus founding team get started and how did you decide what problem to tackle?

We have taken the challenge of designing affordable, food-safe growth media for the cellular agriculture industry to be an engineering challenge. At Imperial College London, I met my co-founders – Kevin with a background in data-science, Reka with synthetic biology and regenerative medicine, and myself with bioengineering – to combine data science and engineering principles to biology and build enabling technology to accelerate the cellular agriculture industry’s time to market and time to price parity and scale.

There is no silver bullet in growth media. Every aspect from amino acids and growth factors to the formulation optimisation and manufacturing is considered in our interdisciplinary approach. With growth factors, we realised in 2020 that similar proteins are already produced at much larger scale and lower price points than we will ever need in the cellular agriculture industry by companies in the industrial enzyme industry. The difficulty with growth factors is that they inherently have a short half-life due to their function as cell-to-cell signalling molecules in dynamic systems (i.e. humans/animals). When the system is stable (i.e. a large bioreactor), the rapid degradation of growth factors creates an expensive problem. Therefore, we decided to utilise readily scalable and affordable technology in precision fermentation and focus our innovation in computational protein design to create biodesigned growth factors with enhanced potency and prolonged activity.

Can you tell us more about how you are using computational biology and machine learning to solve the problem of growth media.

We also recognise scientific understanding of cell metabolism in the new cell types used in cultivated meat is not sufficient to prompt rational design of growth media, especially when using complex or food-grade raw materials. As such, we have turned growth media optimisation into a data-science problem by capturing large amounts of data on cell behaviour and using computational modelling and machine learning to analyse the data and efficiently find the best combinations of ingredients to maximise performance.

As time goes on, we are accumulating more and more data with different ingredients and different cell types to continue improving the efficiency of our platform and thus the control we have over cell growth. One of the unique benefits of our MediOp platform is that we can efficiently customise growth media to meet multiple objectives in a short time-period. This will be especially important when large-scale production of cultivated meat puts constrains on access to raw materials and rapid re-formulation becomes an important business need Multus will be able to meet.

Tell us your plans post-funding.

To bring our novel ingredient discovery and intelligent formulation design, we are investing in a first-of-its-kind production facility to make food-safe growth media at commercial scale with non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK through the EIC Accelerator. We recently announced we achieved ISO22000 certification in our production lab, a major step forward in becoming the all-in-one solution and preferred supplier of growth media to the cellular agriculture industry. Our facility is being built in the UK and will be able to support several companies scaling from bench to pilot, and pilot to commercial manufacturing.


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Tagged:
  • alternative protein
  • growth media
  • growth medium
  • Multus Media

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