Extracellular to Offer UK’s First Low-Cost License-Free Cell Bank for Farmed Meat
Today, Extracellular, a contract meat development and production organization (CDMO), has announced the availability of cost-effective, license-free cell banks for research to UK farmed meat producers. Stem cell banks will be made available to cultured meat researchers and start-ups through StartupUK funding and in partnership with Mutus, another UK start-up focused on cost-effective cultured meat growth media.
Animal cells important for transplanted meat research are often not only expensive and often of poor quality, but often have limited information about their functionality or evolution. Their use is also limited due to strict licensing requirements and commercial agreements. Extracellular aims to address these barriers by providing animal stem cells suitable for transplanted tissue research and development up to 90% cheaper than other cell line providers and free of licensing restrictions.
From the announcement:
Cell banks initially provide cells differentiated from fat, tissue, and bone marrow from beef, pork, and lamb. Information about the evolution of the cells, from the age, breed, and sex of the animal, passage numbers and expected times of population multiplication, will be included with each batch. Additional species and tissue types will be available in the future.
The move comes as many researchers and activists for the farmed meat and future food scene are calling for more open access to shared resources to accelerate development. Startups in the meat farming space often hold their intellectual property close to the vest, but as capitalists try to ignore the environment, there is a growing awareness in society that a certain level of open source behavior will be required if the industry is to continue to move forward and ultimately make a significant contribution to reducing industrial agriculture and its climate impacts.
Isha Datar from New Harvest, who has been pushing for open access to cell ag (her group launched OpenCellAg last summer in collaboration with CULT Food Science), emphasized this in her comments about the program: “Despite the business capital and the initial location, there are many important aspects of cellular agriculture that can (and should) be addressed to share Willigan’s resources at a low cost. equipping and empowering researchers to build a body of work and excellent leadership in the near term, we need to go beyond traditional academics to create basic work in this area;
Mobile banking will be available from next month for UK startups.
