Quote:
Originally Posted by NLSoldier
Induced pluripotent stem cells are going to be our strategy and that of most of the major players in this space as far as I know.
I wonder if cancer cells are worth considering. If everyone else is doing one thing and you do another and succeed, you're hard to beat. The difficulty of stem cells I would guess is the soup required to nourish and stimulate them?
There are an estimated 50 million tons of this beautiful lady around the world:
Get that happening with aggressive bovine connective tissues cancers and you've probably got a winner for ground meat. I imagine there's much lower cost and more mature tech growing immortal prolific cell lines than there is stem cells with their careful coaxing and signalling/nutrients.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NLSoldier
There is a major scaling issue industry wide - the tech has been proven in very small bioreactors but there's a major engineering challenge in scaling to production size bioreactors while still keeping the cells "happy" and proliferating in the same way.
The other probably biggest challenge right now is in finding a cost effective serum-free media to "feed" the cells. Most previous prototypes that have been produced have been made using fetal bovine serum which is prohibitively expensive and widely accepted to not be the sustainable way forward (largely due to the fact that it obviously involves major harm to animals).
Yup. Hence if you get a cow version of HeLa you've laughing.