Cultivated meat cell lines freed up for use by entire sector, enabling the field to leapfrog years of R&D

Boston (OCTOBER 16, 2025)—In an unusual and timely move, a nonprofit scooped up a small portion of a cultivated meat company’s cell lines with the intent of making them available for the good of the entire sector. 

This purchase by the Good Food Institute (GFI) of specific bovine cell lines and serum-free media, and its partnership with Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) to make them available, is projected to save the field millions of dollars and years of cell line development time, accelerating R&D and removing major barriers to entry for startups. This also marks the first time suspension-adapted bovine cell lines will be available for cultivated meat researchers around the world. GFI and Tufts will first make the cell lines available to academic researchers as the organizations work to enable industry access, thus offering a unique opportunity to democratize and standardize R&D efforts.

What led to this acquisition: Following SCiFi’s decision last June to cease operations, the company executed an assignment for the benefit of creditors. The assignee then notified various parties that the assets were being auctioned. Among those parties notified were GFI, Tufts, and other science and research institutions. GFI ultimately decided to place a bid for multiple bovine cell lines along with the required serum-free growth media, with the goal of making those assets available to researchers across the ecosystem. In late August 2024, that bid was accepted, and by mid-September, the cells and media were successfully transferred to TUCCA for storage and eventual distribution.

Benefits to the field: Making these specific cell lines and serum-free growth media widely available helps academia and companies in multiple ways:

• Removing barriers: Currently, each cultivated meat startup has to spend a significant portion of their funding and time on cell line development, which is estimated to cost between $2-10 million per startup. For every 10 cultivated meat startups, access to these materials could save the industry anywhere from $20 to 100 million and alleviate a huge barrier to entry for future startups.
• Jumpstarting innovation: According to GFI’s principal cultivated meat scientist Dr. Elliot Swartz, these are the first immortalized bovine cell lines in suspension that will be made available to the R&D community. Open access to the cells, along with the media formulation to support cell growth and proliferation, will kickstart immediate R&D work and enable studies to be run in small bioreactors which can help researchers refine process development. 
• Catalyzing the field: For the field as a whole, having these cell lines and growth media widely available reduces redundancies and spurs innovation through continued open-access research collaborations. In addition, this benefits pick-and-shovel companies specializing in the underlying technologies needed to produce cultivated meat, from B2B media and scaffold suppliers to bioreactor and other process equipment manufacturers.

As a nonprofit organization and field catalyst for the alternative protein sector, GFI was well-positioned to make this acquisition when the opportunity arose, quickly leveraging its strong network of partners and experts to evaluate and obtain these foundational resources. With an eye on the field as a whole, GFI routinely pursues interventions that will allow alternative proteins to compete on taste, price, and nutrition—work made possible by a global community of donors. This latest move by the nonprofit and international network aims to significantly decrease the energy and resources needed for academic labs to begin research on process development and scale-up, and to eventually enable companies such as new cultivated meat startups and B2B suppliers to leapfrog years of R&D work.  

For researchers from academia and industry interested in accessing the cells, join the waitlist by completing this form (for the top three candidate cell lines currently banked at Tufts). Shipments to academic researchers will begin first via the Tufts Cellular Agriculture Commercialization Lab, with Tufts and GFI working to facilitate access to the cells by commercial entities at a later phase. Media formulations are open-source and available here.