Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

growth media

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

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.

BioBetter is Turning Tobacco Plants into Bioreactors to Drive Down the Cost of Cultivated Meat Growth Media

Food tech startup BioBetter has developed a novel way to create growth factors for cell-cultivated meat utilizing tobacco plants.

Based in Kiryat Shemona, Israel, the company announced today that it has developed a method to create growth factors via molecular farming techniques by essentially turning the tobacco plant into a bioreactor. BioBetter’s technology employs plant cells to produce growth factors instead of more traditional techniques which utilize yeast, bacteria, or CHO in a bioreactor to produce growth factors.

The company’s technology involves identifying the gene of the target protein, cloning it, and transferring it into the tobacco plant. They then select the highest-yielding plants, breed them to develop higher yields, and then ultimately grow and harvest the plants.

As the tobacco plants mature, their cells express the growth factors and store them until harvest. The company then uses a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, producing a high purity product at lower overall costs.

Growth medium is widely recognized in the cell-cultured meat industry as one of the nascent sector’s biggest cost drivers. According to a survey conducted by the Good Food Institute in 2020, growth media made up 80% or more of the total operating cost for 38% of those cell-cultured meat manufacturers who responded, while 72% of respondents indicated that growth media made up half or more of their total operating costs.

“There are multiple advantages to using Nicotiana tabacum as a hardy vector for producing GFs of non-animal origin,” Amit Yaari, CEO of BioBetter, said. “It is an abundant crop that has no place in the food-and-feed chain due to its extremely bitter taste and content of undesirable alkaloids. The global trend for reducing tobacco smoking also is raising concerns among tobacco growers that the crop might eventually become obsolete. Yet the tobacco plant has huge potential to become a key component in the future of food.”

By utilizing molecular farming techniques to derive growth factors entirely from the tobacco plants, BioBetter enters its name among a new cohort of startups looking to help scale up lower-cost media free of animal inputs. Other startups that have been developing growth medium alternatives free of FBS (fetal bovine serum) include Seawith and Back of the Yards Algae Sciences, both of which are utilizing algae to derive animal-free growth medium, and Biftek , which is using a secretive mix on microorganisms to create its animal-free growth medium. In addition, cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat has also been very open about its efforts to develop growth media free of FBS and claims to have achieved an 80x reduction in cost.

“BioBetter is pioneering a novel protein expression platform to address the fast-growing demand for complex recombinant proteins,” Oded Shoseyov said. “Our GF technology will enable production of animal-free GFs at a scale of thousands of tons per year, and at a cost of US$1 per gram. This will alleviate one of the biggest bottlenecks in advancing cultured meat to mass production.”

TurtleTree Scientific Partners With JSBiosciences to Develop Cell Culture Media at Commercial Scale

TurtleTree Scientific, the B2B arm of cellular ag company TurtleTree Labs, announced today a new partnership with JSBiosciences to collaborate on the development of cell culture media. The overarching goal of the partnership is to bring down the cost of production for cell-cultured products in order to eventually achieve commercial scale.

Singapore-based TurtleTree Labs is best known for its technology that produces human milk from mammalian cells. The company launched its TurtleTree Scientific arm earlier this year with the goal of creating food-grade growth factors for cultured protein products.

Finding a growth media that is accessible, affordable, and that doesn’t rely on animals to get remains one of the biggest challenges for cultured protein companies. Some companies are now trying to distance themselves from the use of the controversial fetal bovine serum (FBS), but alternatives are few and far between, not to mention wildly expensive. 

JSBiosciences is a valuable partner in this area because it already has a successful track record of developing mammalian cell culture media at a large scale. The company will provide TurtleTree with food-grade basal media and media formulation services, with the goal of getting “upstream” production costs low enough to allow for commercial-scale production of cell-cultured products, starting in Singapore.

This is the second major partnership for TurtleTree Scientific so far in 2021. Last month, the company announced a collaboration with biotech company Dyadic International. Through that partnership, the two companies are developing recombinant food-grade growth factors for proteins that can be grown in high yields at lower costs in bioreactors.