BSF Enterprise PLC (LSE:BSFA) said its lab-grown meat subsidiary is teaming up with a specialist in growth-enabling stem cell engineering to accelerate development of ‘cruelty-free meat’.
3D Bio-Tissues, which is wholly owned by BSF, last week made a major breakthrough toward its objective of producing what it said were some of the world’s first full-scale cultivated meat fillets, with three small meat fillets slightly smaller than a 5p piece produced, grilled and eaten so far.
3DBT has now signed up Cambridge-based Qkine to work on optimising “the effectiveness of animal-free cultures to reduce the dependence on other protein compounds, increase yields, and lower overall costs”.
As part of the collaboration, 3DBT’s City-mix animal-free media supplement will be combined with Qkine's growth-enabling protein engineering technology.
The company said that compared to competitors looking to create lab-grown meat, City-mix is a much cheaper supplement that replaces the costly serums necessary to grow meat cells.
Combining Qkine’s technology that helps speed growth of stem cell cultures, with 3DBT's innovative macromolecular crowding technology “enhances the speed of development of protein components in culture media”, it added.
In short, the combination is expected to reduce the production time and costs for growing cultivated meat, which BSF expects to “pave the way for advances in cellular agriculture in the UK and world-wide”.