CellRx on a mission to slash cost of growth factors used in cell-cultured meat production For cell-cultured meat to be commercially viable, we’ll need to see significant movement in the price and availability of growth factors (signaling proteins that stimulate cell growth and differentiation) says UK-based CellRx, which says it can produce a proprietary version of insulin-like growth factor at a fraction of the standard price for IGF-1.
One of the many challenges facing cell-cultured meat companies is producing an affordable animal-free growth medium (early prototypes of cell cultured beef, for example, used fetal bovine serum, the liquid part of blood, a byproduct of the livestock industry, which somewhat defeats the purpose of cell-cultured meat).