Imperial College team helping lab-grown meat industry become more sustainable

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Imperial College team helping lab-grown meat industry become more sustainable

25 September 2019
News
A team of undergraduate students have developed a new technology to reduce the cost of lab-grown meat and help the industry become more sustainable.

Team MultusMedia scooped the top prize £7,000 in the Faculty of Natural Sciences Make a Difference Competition for their idea. 

The team, made up of Cai Linton (Bioengineering), Evan Whooley (Life Sciences), Kevin Pan (Life Sciences) and Réka Trón (Life Sciences), are creating an enabling technology for the clean meat industry. 

Cai Linton, co-founder of Multus Media

Lab-grown meat, also known as clean or cultivated meat, works by taking stem cells from an animal and placing them in a nutrient-rich environment to encourage them to grow. This could offer a more ethical and environmentally sustainable alternative to traditional meats.

Currently the clean meat industry is doing this by growing meat produce in bioreactors, vessels that carry out biological reactions, instead of using animals. The growth medium used to encourage the cells to grow however is usually very expensive and is harvested from pregnant cows, therefore has both financial and ethical issues.