Cell culture media formulas are a closely guarded secret in the nascent cell-cultured meat industry, says Bangalore-based Richcore Lifesciences. However, they typically contain water, amino acids (lysine, arginine etc), sugars (glucose), salts, vitamins, buffering agents, recombinant proteins (albumin, transferrin etc) and growth factors (FGF, IGF, TGF etc), which send signals to encourage cells to do certain things such as proliferate or differentiate. And catalog prices for the latter can run into thousands of dollars a gram, which is fine if you’re using them to culture cells in a laboratory, but presents challenges if you’re using them to produce tons of meat, said Richcore Lifesciences, which has 15 years’ experience in producing recombinant proteins from various microbial expression systems (such as bacteria and fungi) for the pharmaceutical industry, and is now turning its attention to food.
Source: Reducing the cost of cell-cultured meat… In conversation with Richcore Lifesciences