UK-based start-up Multus has introduced Proliferum B, a new animal component-free cell culture media designed for the cultivated meat sector.

The high-performance growth media addresses the challenges of cost, reliability and ethics that are associated with the use of foetal bovine serum (FBS).

In a statement Multus said “Media development is a critical but slow and expensive process in the scale-up journey for cultivated meat companies. Teams often spend years sourcing and testing ingredients and optimising formulations for their cells. To date, there have been no media products on the market specifically developed for cultivated meat, using industry-relevant cells.”

Proliferum B, developed using bovine cells and tested on bovine and murine (mice), is now available to customers.

The growth media enables cultivated meat companies to accelerate early R&D without depending on FBS or needing to spend 'years' focusing on media development.

Multus tested Proliferum B against FBS across various cell types including primary bovine fibroblasts, immortalised bovine satellite cells and immortalised murine pre-adipocytes.

Its latest in-house research showcases Proliferum B’s ability to deliver shorter doubling times for multiple cell types, accelerating research timelines. It has also shown consistent performance across multiple passages.

It is Multus’s first product developed using the machine learning-driven system it specifically created for media development. With this approach, Multus is making it cheaper and faster to get media that performs better and costs less, to help cultivated meat get from lab to market.

Multus co-founder and CEO, Cai Linton, said “We want cultivated meat to be affordable and accessible to all. To achieve that, we need to make media development much more efficient so cultivated meat companies can progress and scale faster. We believe machine learning can radically accelerate lab research, so we created a system specifically to do this. Proliferum B marks its first product, taking nine months from lab to market. We're now keen to get this into customers' hands and to support their journey.”

Proliferum B is available to sample now.

#growthmedia #serum #Multus #UK