There’s a laundry list of reasons why cultivated meat is better for the planet, better for animals, and better for our health. So why aren’t we seeing cell-based meat in our supermarkets?

Because making cultivated meat is very expensive, making it impossible to scale. The input costs are much too high to consider bringing products to market. And the most expensive piece in production –accounting for over 80% of production’s cost–  is a component in cell culture media called growth factors.

At Edge, they’re solving this growth factor problem. They’ve created a novel bioprocess using animal cell factories that self-supply authentic growth factors. Their bioprocess methodology is sourced from mammalian cells, meaning they’re more closely mimicking the natural biological process that occurs within organisms. It isn’t through fermentation or molecular farming –both of which have extensive downstream processing. The direct production costs in recombinant protein production are very much influenced by the downstream process, specifically the isolation and purification steps. By innovating a method that needs no downstream processing, they’ve effectively cut most of the costs.

Their cell factories, compatible with existing bioprocesses, ensure a constant supply of growth factors to cells in an innovative system. The result is an increase in cell activity and a drastic decrease in production costs and contamination risk.