The Good Food Institute (GFI) has acquired commercially relevant bovine cell lines and serum-free growth media formulations from the defunct startup SCiFi Foods, a key move to accelerate the cultivated meat industry, which often lacks the time and capital for essential R&D. These assets, developed over four years at great expense, are being made available first to academia via Tufts University and later to industry, addressing the field’s critical lack of a standardized “workhorse” cell line analogous to those used in biopharma. By openly sharing this intellectual property, which includes immortalized cells adapted for scalable suspension culture and commercially relevant media, GFI aims to remove barriers to entry, catalyze research, reduce redundant efforts, and provide academics with the necessary tools to generate more accurate, translational data for techno-economic models. Dr. Andrew Stout of Tufts highlighted the value of these immortalized bovine fibroblasts adapted for suspension, calling them a crucial starting point that will allow researchers to build new IP, move beyond outdated biopharma data, and better inform the next generation of cultivated meat products.
Source: GFI acquires SCiFi Foods’ cell lines, media formulations