Cambridge Student Wins Award for Open-Source Cell Bank to Advance Cultivated Meat Research
Callan MacDonald, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, has won PETA’s first-ever Future Without Speciesism Cash Award for his AgriCell project, which could “revolutionize the cultivated meat industry, saving billions of animals.” AgriCell is a cell bank designed to standardize and archive primary cells — the building blocks for cultivated meat production — and provide a shared resource of reliable and well-characterized cells. The initiative seeks to address the challenges arising from the variability in primary cells, which can impact the cost-efficiency of growing meat in bioreactors, as well as the final product’s taste, flavor, and texture. PETA argues that companies continue to search for the best primary cell sources (freshly isolated from organ tissue) and tend to keep their successful cell sources …