Our efforts in cultivated meat focus on creating scalable, cost-effective processes that enable the industrial production of cultured chicken, lamb, and beef. We pioneered the development of spontaneously immortalized fibroblast lines capable of anchorage-independent growth in serum-free conditions (Pasitka et al. Nature Food 2022), a critical advancement for achieving high-density cultures. We showed phosphatidyl choline, in soy lecithin, is a PPARy agonist capable of direct differentiation of chicken fibroblasts to adipocytes (Pasitka et al. Nature Food 2022). Our cell lines reach densities of up to 130×10⁶ cells/ml in continuous perfusion bioreactors, translating to a production yield exceeding 43% weight/volume, a significant improvement over traditional fed-batch systems (Pasitka et al. Nature Food 2024).

 

 

Our bioprocessing approach leveraged high density cell retention technologies, like tangential flow filtration (TFF), which supports scalability up to 5,000 and 25,000-liter bioreactors. We integrate a proprietary animal-component-free (ACF) medium containing methylcellulose and hydroxypropyl β-cyclodextrin, which replaces expensive serum components such as albumin. This innovation reduces medium costs to $0.63 per liter, achieving an 80% reduction compared to conventional formulations, while ensuring robust cell growth and full culture recovery over multiple harvest cycles. These advances, validated through techno-economic modeling, demonstrate that cultivated chicken production can achieve cost parity with organic chicken at $6.20 per pound when scaled to a 50,000-liter facility​ (Pasitka et al. Nature Food 2024).