Qkine and 3D Bio-Tissues collaboration awarded €100,000 at EIT Food Venture Summit 2022

A collaboration between Qkine and 3D Bio-Tissues has been awarded one of four prestigious prizes at the 2022 EIT Food Venture Summit, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The Cultivated Meat Innovation Challenge, in partnership with GFI Europe, was created with the aim of discovering pioneering solutions to decrease the cost of cell culture media, making cultivated meat affordable and accessible. The €100,000 prize will be used by Qkine and 3D Bio-Tissues to optimize animal-free culture media and accelerate the commercialization of cultivated meat.

Cellular agriculture has the potential to provide key elements of human nutrition without the environmental impact of traditional animal farming. It offers a feasible alternative for creating dietary meat, reducing the land and water demands and antibiotic use required by animal farming, while also cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Cell culture media is essential for the production of cultivated meat but it can be prohibitively expensive at scale. To implement cultivated meats at an industrial scale, efficient media feeds are needed to culture muscle and fat cells in bespoke bioreactors.

Qkine will combine their world-leading animal-free optimized growth factors with City-mix™ supplements, a novel serum-free media technology for culturing muscle and fat cells, developed by Newcastle-based 3D Bio-Tissues. Combining 3D Bio-Tissues highly innovative macromolecular crowding technology with Qkine high bioactivity growth factors has the potential to replace and enhance the functionality of protein components in culture media. This work will also utilize a thermostable engineered form of FGF-2 (bFGF) from Qkine. FGF-2 is an essential growth factor (cytokine) in pluripotent stem cell culture protocols. Qkine manufactures a new tag-free form of thermostable FGF-2 protein, FGF2-G3, for compatibility with regulated applications and industrial scale processes. This optimized form of the protein does not degrade in culture media, leading to a range of applications in the cultivated meat industry.

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