Tufts University and Good Food Institute rescue cultivated meat lines for open industry use

The cell grown meat product from SciFi Foods was positioned for FDA approval as a consumer product just before the company closed operations. TUCCA and Good Foods Institute purchased the cell lines to make them available to the industry for further development. Credit: SciFi Foods

The Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) has partnered with the Good Food Institute (GFI) to rescue and redistribute cell lines and related intellectual property from cultivated meat startups that have closed or downsized.

The initiative will make these assets openly available to researchers and food businesses, safeguarding years of research and millions of dollars in R&D as funding for cultivated meat tightened in 2023.

Central to the effort are cell lines – specific animal cells capable of growing indefinitely in nutrient-rich media – which can be used to generate lab-grown or cultivated meat. By sharing these widely, TUCCA and GFI say the approach can help improve efficiency, resilience and product diversity across the food system.

SCiFi Foods cell lines salvaged after startup closure

One of the first major acquisitions involves cell lines from San Francisco-based startup SCiFi Foods.

Founded to develop cultivated beef, the company raised $40m across multiple funding rounds and developed a hybrid burger made from 90 percent soy protein and 10 percent cultivated beef cells. It also submitted its cultivated beef to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for regulatory approval before investor sentiment shifted and the company closed. SCiFi’s assets, including its cell lines, were subsequently sold at auction.

Meera Zassenhaus, director of communications for TUCCA, said:

We didn’t know who else might show up for the auction, but collectively agreed it would be a shame for SCiFI’s technology to get locked in a box somewhere, so we were excited that GFI decided to bid.”

GFI secured the winning bid, acquiring eight bovine cell lines along with recipes for two serum-free media formulations. The assets were transferred to Tufts for storage and validation, with the intention of making them available for others to use and further develop.

The cell lines include three of SCiFi’s most commercially advanced beef lines, all modified using CRISPR gene-editing to enable continuous growth in culture and adapted to grow in scalable single-cell suspension. Two of the lines have also been engineered to remove antibiotic resistance markers, making them suitable for food applications.

Focus on scale-up and bioreactor-ready cell lines

The cells will form the foundation of an open-access cell bank run by the Tufts Cellular Agriculture Commercialization Lab, which is currently raising funds to expand its infrastructure and develop additional cell lines from a range of livestock and harvested animal species.

Andrew Stout, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts and lead on the cell bank programme, said the cell lines will be available with very few restrictions on use.

He added:

The most exciting feature about the first cell lines is that they can be grown in single-cell suspension.

That allows for simple, large-scale production in bioreactors, making them the first such livestock-based cell lines broadly available to the field.”

The cell bank will sit within TUCCA’s planned future foods innovation hub, offering shared prototyping and scale-up facilities, incubator lab space for startups and access to expert networks to accelerate cellular agriculture development in Massachusetts and globally.

In addition to the SCiFi assets, the TUCCA cell bank plans to offer bovine, pork and mackerel cell lines developed at Tufts. Demand is expected to be high, with an official waitlist available for interested organisations.

Zassenhaus concluded:

We are essentially composting intellectual property, or IP, from an individual start-up and transforming it into a public good to benefit the entire field.

This model of IP re-use makes sense for all kinds of technologies even beyond alternative proteins, especially as climate tech broadly faces a contraction in funding.”

Food and beverage professionals keen to see how fermentation-driven innovation and advanced formulation are translating from lab research into commercial products can explore the topic further in New Food’s upcoming webinar, The science of next-gen ingredients: fermentation, formulation and function.