Ready to unlock your cells’ potential?
No other teamis as dedicated to advancing cell culture media as Multus. Talk to our mediaspecialists today!
No other teamis as dedicated to advancing cell culture media as Multus. Talk to our mediaspecialists today!
Biologics are the backbone of modern medicine - powering antibody therapies, vaccines, and advanced cell and gene therapies. But manufacturing these complex therapies is not simple. Even as upstream and downstream technologies advance, one foundational element remains under‑leveraged: cell culture media - the nutrient environment in which biologic‑producing cells grow.
Media profoundly shapes growth, productivity, product quality, and manufacturability. Yet most processes still rely on off‑the‑shelf, generic formulations, creating avoidable bottlenecks in development and scale‑up.
At Multus, we’ve built a platform specifically to address these issues, helping biologics teams navigate and eliminate the bottlenecks that hold programs back. Here’s how smarter media can fix three of the largest biologics challenges:
Traditional media development typically begins with off‑the‑shelf formulations and then iterates via design‑of‑experiments and trial‑and‑error screening. This is why teams start with generic media instead of purpose‑built solutions - because bespoke media has historically taken months or even years to optimize.
Biologics process development and manufacturing costs are so high that CMC workflows alone can consume 13-17% of total R&D budgets, with early‑phase material supply strategy alone costing tens of millions of dollars (Farid et al., 2020).
This drags out timelines, delaying critical milestones in IND-enabling studies and commercial readiness. Worse still, once a suboptimal media is locked in, it’s difficult and expensive to fix later.
How smarter media helps: Rather than starting with generic formulations - and paying the price in extended DoE cycles and uncertain outcomes - smarter media approaches use predictive models and systematic screening to identify high‑performance formulations up front. Multus’ AI-driven MediOP™ platform eliminates iterative guesswork and accelerates optimization by up to 5x, helping teams select media that work for their specific cell line and product much earlier in development.
When you scale from lab flasks to bioreactors, the impact of media becomes even more pronounced. Generic media can support cell growth at a small scale, but productivity can fall off, yield can vary, and quality attributes can shift when cells encounter new metabolic environments at scale.
Scale-up inconsistency is a big commercial risk. For a biologic with around $1 billion in annual sales, every month of delay during technology transfer and scale-up can lead to a loss of $80 million (Carpio, 2020)
Inefficient upstream performance increases the cost of goods and can cause manufacturing failures that require rework or even process redesign. In an industry where commercialization relies on predictable, high-yield processes, suboptimal media is a direct drag on bottom-line performance.
How smarter media helps: Optimized media tailored to how a cell line behaves, not just how it grows, can deliver higher titers and stable performance across scales. Multus takes a mechanistic, data-driven approach to media design that helps maintain a consistent metabolic state as bioreactor conditions change, resulting in more product per batch, lower variability, and smoother scale-up transitions from pilot to commercial volumes.
A major but often overlooked source of inconsistency in biologics manufacturing is media variability. Many legacy media products use undefined or animal-derived components, leading to batch-to-batch variation that can alter cell growth and protein quality - even when everything else in your process is tightly controlled.
Raw material availability issues account for roughly 27% of all drug shortages (Anderson, 2025), underscoring the critical need for consistent input supply to ensure uninterrupted, scalable manufacturing.
This variability creates regulatory and supply risks. Undefined components trigger additional analytical burdens during validation and regulatory submissions, and sourcing challenges can disrupt manufacturing timelines.
How smarter media helps: Robust media design replaces variable, poorly defined components with chemically defined, scalable alternatives that utilise secure supply chains. Multus’ platform ensures consistency at the ingredient level that directly translates into consistency in cell culture performance. That means fewer surprises and fewer regulatory headaches.
While cell line engineering and process optimisation have advanced rapidly, media design has lagged behind. But the evidence is clear: media directly affects development speed, productivity, quality, and risk.
Smarter media - designed with cell metabolism, process goals, and manufacturability in mind is a key competitive advantage for biologics teams.
Multus’ AI-enabled platform (MediOP™) combines in‑house experimental data generation, AI‑driven design, and automated screening into a full‑stack platform for media innovation. With smarter media, biologics teams can move faster, scale more reliably, and control risk - across development and commercial production.
Ready to unlock your cells’ potential? Talk to our media specialists today
Sign up for email updates:
