About This Project

Cultivated meat seeks to revolutionize food infrastructure by developing sustainable production of meat via biotechnology. Techno-economic analyses show a key barrier to economic viability is cost of FBS-free cell growth media; the predominant expense of in medias are growth factors (GFs), responsible for up to 90% of cost. To achieve cost reduction goals, we seek to engineer improved GF performance in cell culture.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Cultivated meat seeks to revolutionize food infrastructure through sustainable production of livestock-derived products through cell-based biotechnology. Emerging techno-economic analyses have shown a key barrier to economic viability is the cost of FBS-free growth media; the leading expense are growth factors at 90% of the total cost. Reducing cost here is crucial for cultivated meat as a future-staple consumer product; improvements are needed in the cost of growth factor production and the needed dose of GF per liter of active cell culture. This research seeks to create a pipeline to engineer more effective growth factors for directing & sustaining undifferentiated cell culture through defined biosynthetic medias.

What is the significance of this project?

Natural proteins are marginally stable and sensitive to environmental changes. Proteins can be engineered in foreign expression platforms, with variants exhibiting increased yield, decreased degradation, and reduced sensitivity. Fibroblast Growth Factor 2 (FGF2) is an essential pleiotropic regulator of cell proliferation and a huge contributor to media costs. Preliminary work includes a biochemical kinetic model for FGF2 to identify significant engineerable protein parameters. Results show better stabilized and endocytic recycling-prone FGF2 variants decrease the amount needed in media for proliferative culture. Improving such metrics will decrease needed initial concentrations, helping reduce cultivated meat scale-up costs significantly.

What are the goals of the project?

We seek to develop a ‘high throughput growth factor engineering pipeline’ with FGF2 that can be applied to produce various synthetic growth factors that are 1) active longer at 37C; 2) of increased potency; and 3) cheaper to manufacture. Project goals not only seek to optimize growth factors for cultivated meat production, but also to test and utilize protein engineering strategies that have not yet been tested on such class of proteins. This project aims to achieve a fundamental understanding of growth factor-receptor structure-function relationships and define concentration-dependent, isolated growth factor signaling effects, specifically on porcine myogenic, mesenchymal, and iPSC proliferation and differentiation for large-scale cultivated meat development.