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#InventedAtImperial
Multus Media
#InventedAtImperial: Multus Media
The problem Cultivated meat can take a single animal cell and grow actual meat, giving the same taste and experience as conventional meat, with only a fraction of the environmental impact, and without the need to kill animals or use antibiotics. One of the key challenges facing this industry is the cost of production, where the feed, or growth media in this case, takes up more than 80 per cent of production costs. Traditionally, animal blood serum is used to grow stem cells for biomedical research, but this is both very expensive and goes against the ethical and sustainability aspirations of the cultivated meat industry. The solution Multus Media is developing the technology for creating completely animal-free replacements for blood serum. The challenge here is to develop highperforming growth media using ingredients that are inexpensive and scalable. We take care of growth media, so cultivated meat companies can focus on bringing tasty, sustainable meat to everyone.
Globally, animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gases than all the world’s transportation systems combined. The science for growing real meat without animals exists, but the remaining challenge is scale. Multus Media has developed an animal-free replacement for blood serum that can be used to feed the cells affordably and profitably. This will accelerate the forefront of an industry that will mitigate the devastating impacts of livestock agriculture. D/srupt The magazine for innovators & entrepreneurs
Where did the idea originate? Kevin Pan, our CTO, first introduced the team to cultivated meat back in late 2018 and we were captivated by the possibility of eating sustainable, guilt-free meat. When we asked ourselves why we weren’t able to buy these products yet, the cost of production, or more specifically the cost of growth media, kept coming up as the major bottleneck holding this entire industry back. Since growth media has been developed for the biopharmaceutical and biomedical research industries for decades, we saw the challenge of producing an animal-free growth media that can be
scaled to serve the emerging cultivated meat industry as an engineering challenge as opposed to a scientific challenge. By moving away from the strict regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, we can embrace new methods for streamlining the production process and explore more efficient ways of providing cell nutrition, using vegan ingredients. How did your team meet? The team met through the Imperial College Synthetic Biology Hub, with many of us being first- or secondyear undergraduates. There was a competition to win some money to start a project in the Advanced Hackspace, so we rallied behind Kevin’s project of producing next-generation growth media for the cultivated meat industry to kickstart the product and business development. Do you have any advisers? We gained our first formal advisers through IVMS and have also benefited from scientific advice from the excellent academic staff at Imperial across the departments of Bioengineering, Chemical Engineering, Life Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, and we are grateful for their continued guidance today. We also have an external adviser, Tom Phillips, who is a former Sustainability Fellow at McKinsey & Co. who helps us with assessing and establishing strategic partnerships. What stage is the business at and what are your plans moving forward? Right now, we have the funding and lab space to develop our first proof of concept and patent our technology, which we can use to create our first products and and bring investors on board. Our goal is to launch our first product, Issue 3 / 2020–21
