Public Funding for Extracellular Ltd

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.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations predicts that food production must increase by 50% by 2050 to feed a global population of 10bn. Feeding this growing population with finite land and water resources is one of the greatest challenges facing humankind. Livestock agriculture currently consumes 70% of available arable land and 27% of global freshwater, and is one of the major contributors to climate change, air and water pollution, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, animal welfare concerns, and human health risks such as zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. Cultivated meat and seafood offer a sustainable alternative, produced through cultivation of terrestrial, avian, and aquatic animal cells and indistinguishable from conventional meat. Cultivated meat represents an enormous opportunity to decarbonise meat production, reduce land and water usage, slow biodiversity loss, and feed more people with fewer resources. Furthermore, cultivated meat alleviates ethical concerns over the treatment of animals, does not require any use of antibiotics, and has positive implications for food security in an evolving geopolitical climate. Despite this vast opportunity, development and scale-up of cultivated meat products is critically constrained by a lack of food-grade ingredients, long product development cycles, and the huge cost of equipment/manufacturing facilities. Extracellular is the first dedicated manufacturing partner to support cellular agriculture, accelerating the development and commercialisation of cultivated meat products. Our unique integrated approach consolidates a fragmented value-chain, enabling cultivated meat companies to develop better products faster, cheaper, and achieve scale at significantly lower risk. The Innovate UK project will deliver a range of proprietary food-grade growth-media solutions that enable product development costs and lead-times to be reduced by \>50%.

With a growing global population and increasing global consumption of meat, it is essential to move to more sustainable methods of food production to mitigate our climate impact. Cultivated meat has the potential to significantly reduce our environmental impact by growing meat directly from a sample of cells taken from an animal. This reduces land use, antibiotic use, greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water use, as well as reducing the need for intensive animal farming practices. Most cultivated meat research starts with samples of cells from species relevant for consumption, however these cells are expensive to source and are challenging to obtain for most researchers, stifling innovation and growth of the sector in the UK. This project aims to accelerate the development of cultivated meat products and enabling technologies by generating cultivated meat cell banks for research purposes.