Low-cost food-grade alternatives for serum albumins in FBS-free cell culture media

Cultivated meat may be an ethical, environmentally friendly, antibiotic-free meat alternative of the future. As of now, one of the main limiting factors for bringing cultivated meat to the market is the high cost of the cell culture media and their great dependency on serum albumins, production of which is predicted to become a major bottleneck of this industry. Here, using bovine muscle stem cells, we optimized serum free B8/B9 medium. We identified several food grade, low-price medium stabilizers, exhibiting comparable or even superior stabilization of the B8 medium in short- and long-term cultivations, as compared to recombinant human serum albumin. We show transferability of our approach to other satellite cells (porcine, chicken) and CHO cells, though significant cell-line specific differences in response to stabilizers were observed. Thus, we provide an alternative to serum albumin, enabling up to an overall 73% reduction of medium price for certain cell lines.