Vitronectin is a protein present naturally in animals and can be used with the growth media for cultivated meat to help attachment and speed up the growth and proliferation of cells.
Using vitronectin to make cultivated meat significantly increases the rate of production.
The launch of vitronectin is a significant step forward in the quest to make cultivated meat a viable and affordable alternative to traditional meat production. As Multus CEO Cai Linton notes,
"Multus’ Vitronectin is uniquely designed for the cultivated meat industry and has the potential to unlock the affordable scale-up of cultivated meat production and shorten routes to market.”
This game-changing product launch is the latest in a series of announcements from Multus which include:
Despite cultivated meat companies raising a record $603.7 million in venture funding in 2022 (PitchBook), the cost, ethics and food-safety of key ingredients are a major barrier to the sector being an affordable alternative.
Cost
In terms of the former, to achieve competitive pricing, today’s cultivated meat suppliers need to reach a 100 x decrease in price.
This is highly unlikely without lowering the price of key ingredients which make up the majority of the cost.
For example, growth media alone makes up 55 - 95% of cultivated meat product cost (Good Food Institute 2022).
Ethics and sustainability
Ethics and scalability: Foetal Bovine Serum (FBS) has previously been used in cultivated meat as a growth media. However, it is unethically sourced and experiences large price and performance fluctuations.
By contrast, many serum free formulations are expensive and do not perform well across the range of cell lines used in cultivated meat.
Multus is the team of scientists and engineers tackling these scaling challenges by developing ingredients specifically created for affordable, scalable cultivated meat.
Our growth media ingredients and formulations are the building blocks of cellular agriculture and enable the affordable at-scale production of real animal products, including meat, dairy, leather, and more - using cells instead of animals.
Multus is at the forefront of the sustainable protein transition, pioneering the design and production of key ingredients. Our unique approach enables a genuinely sustainable alternative to intensive animal farming, which continues to erode biodiversity, monopolise arable land, and emit high levels of greenhouse gases.
Click here to learn more about Multus vitronectin
Partnering with a specialist in growth media can turn bottlenecks into breakthroughs that accelerate scale-up and de-risk the business
Read more →A critical challenge to scaling cultivated meat is the cost and scalability of growth factors. Bioengineered proteins present a possible solution.
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