Thread by @NewHarvestOrg

Beloved #CellAg community!

This is @tobiasmess and I have the honour to live-tweet about today's @CellAgOS's session again: @yukihanyu1 will talk about how to democratise cultured-meat production!

Tune into the talk at: caos.community/live
#CAOS2020

2/n Yuki is a lot into Sci-Fi and that's what go him excited about cultured meat in the first place: It's the meat of the future!

3/n #CulturedMeat is already a lot cheaper today than it used to be 5 years ago but there's still two big problem about: You need cell lines (GMO's) as a starting material and growth factors as media supplement!

4/n Yuki and his group had a cheap solution for: Their in-house developed 'Culnet' system provide cells with a conditioning medium from Yeast. They even now scaled it up towards a large-scale cultured system!

5/n Culture media are so expensive because the production of growth factors (such as Albumin, transferrin, EGF, HGF) is. As a solution, CulNet is using the compound media from feeder cells (i.e. liver cells or any other cell type, really) - making the media a lot cheaper!

6/n However: How do you control your culture though if each condition medium coming from different feeder cells are different? Well, you simply make the variation to your own advantage and combine different feeder cells depending on which effect you want on your target cells!

7/n Compared with 10% FBS growth medium, the CulNet System combination-media have resulted in almost 50-60% of the growth rate! Woop woop!

8/n With this approach, you can of course not only make Cultured Meat but also cultured blood or even whole tissues: IntegriCulture's goal is to produce a steak by 2025!

9/n They are using undefined cultured media because it will always be cheaper than defined media. Over the next years, @yukihanyu1 wants to get from food additive supplements to yeast to algae - getting the price under 0.1$ per litre!

10/n How could the future of meat production look like? Huge bioreactors would only be available to huge monopolies, which is a future no one desires.
However, Yuki is imagining meat breweries on a minimum-efficient scale: Cutting-edge technology available to everyone!

11/n Scale-up isn't everything! Why should we care about the minimum-efficient scale (MES)? High-MES is capital intensive, thus only available to big budget BUT low-MES would lead to the democratisation of #cellag production: DIY steaks for everyone? Yes, please!

12/n I couldn't summarise this slide better - what a wonderful vision of the future of food!

13/n So how do we enable the low-MES scenario?
We need inexpensive and accessible bioreactors, open-access cellbanks and publicly available media recipes.
@yukihanyu1's #CulNetConsortium is developing exactly this - paving the way to a democratised future of #cellularagriculture

14/n That's all from me today (@tobiasmess)!

Thanks a lot for joining today's #CAOS2020 session @CellAgOS with the wonderful @yukihanyu1 from @shojinmeat!

Sad that you missed the talk?
No worries, it will be available for the next 48h at caos.community/slack

(n=14).