Nov.16, 2017

Integriculture Inc. signs a joint research contract with Tokyo Women’s Medical University on cellular agriculture.

Integriculture Inc., a biotechnology and food company aiming to reform modern agriculture through cultivated meat, has signed a joint research contract with Tokyo Women’s Medical University under the title of “Prototyping and demonstration of an automated cell culture system based on intercellular interactions and stimulation of cell growth.

The low-cost animal-free culture media developed through this joint research is expected to reduce the prohibitively high cost of cell culture. Reduced cell culture costs have significant positive impact on regenerative medicine and cellular agriculture by making the products affordable and saving the time for commercialization.

For details, please refer to the following announcement.

Cellular Agriculture

Cellular agriculture is an interdisciplinary branch of science at the intersection of medicine and farming. Cellular agriculture capitalizes on breakthroughs in tissue-engineering, material sciences, bioengineering, and synthetic biology to design new ways of producing existing agricultural products. Clean meat production by cell culture is one of the applications of cellular agriculture.

Integriculture Inc.,

Integriculture Inc. develops low-cost large scale cell culture system that enables industrial cellular agriculture such as cultivated meat production.

Cultivated meat production used to cost more than $1,000,000/kg in 2013, but food grade animal-free culture medium and continuous flow based cell culture system developed at Integriculture Inc. has driven the cost down to ~$300/kg equivalent in laboratory scale.

Concept of small scale test plant
Future expectations

The Institute of Advanced Biomedical Engineering & Science in TWMU, a research institute for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, joining cellular agriculture research will make tremendous contribution to the industrial scaling of cell and tissue engineering.

Achievements from this joint research are expected to pave the way for cellular agriculture startups to enter the $2 trillion global protein market as well as improving food security status of certain import-reliant countries like Japan.

Integriculture’s culture medium
Integriculture greatly reduces the cost of culture medium by replacing the fetal bovine serum (FBS) in the conventional culture medium with “FBS substitutes” found in common food.
By integrating it with its patented networked culture system ‘“CulNet system”), Integriculture reduces medium cost down to $0.10/L, that is, to 1/10000 of conventional medium.

Integriculture’s patented coculture system (“CulNet system”)
By co-culturing muscle cells and a cells that produce growth factors separately in connected bioreactors, “CulNet system” enhances the efficiency of the aforementioned low cost culture medium and thereby enables highly efficient production of cultivated meat.
Unlike the conventional disposable batch system, “CulNet system” grows cells through continuous flow process, meaning that the system can be scaled through parallelization as well as upsizing.

【Contact】
Integriculture Inc.（Attn: Yuki Hanyu）
E-mail: info@integriculture.jp