Jennifer Joseph 2025-07-26 09:39:35
BREAKTHROUGH BIOMANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY CAN PROGRAM CELL GROWTH WITH LIGHT, ALLOWING COMPANIES TO PRODUCE CULTIVATED MEAT WITH HIGHER PRODUCTION OUTPUT — AND WITHOUT COSTLY, UNSUSTAINABLE GROWTH FACTORS.
When cellular agriculture first made a splash in the mainstream media back in 2013, it was lauded with much hype and hope. Industry experts and venture capitalists saw cultivated meat as a future-looking solution to meet growing global demand for protein, increase food security and dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of meat production.
But while plenty of progress has been made in developing cultured meat products over the past decade, researchers and startups keep hitting the same economic hurdle: Growing cells requires recombinant proteins or growth factors that can cost as much as gold, gram for gram — and this expense drives input costs too high for cultivated meat products to be priced competitively with conventional meat.
From afar, Deniz Kent watched this conundrum play out time and again. He was working as a stem cell biologist in liver research, but he felt he needed to do something about climate change and knew cell-cultured meat could make a difference if it could be produced less expensively.
Kent had been exploring optogenetics, a field of neuroscience where light is used to control and monitor neuron activity, when he was struck by a radical idea: Could the same signaling technology apply to other biological processes? Could light replace expensive growth media?
Light, Kent reasoned, is a cheap, abundant resource. It’s inherently sterile so there’s no risk of contamination to bioreactors, eliminating the need for expensive viral filters. And unlike growth factors, which can vary from batch to batch, light patterns are consistently reproducible.
“Light is the best way to control biology because it’s the cheapest possible input,” Kent says. “It’s the most controllable, the most sterile, the most reproducible and the easiest to tune with closed loop control.”
He put together a team to play out the concept in experiments, and his gamble paid off: In January 2021, the team — now known as Prolific Machines — was successfully growing meat cells without growth factors.
“We invented a way to eliminate growth factors and activate the same receptors using light,” says Kent, co-founder and CEO of Prolific Machines. “We can make any protein, and we cut the growth time frame in half using the same tool.”
Just a few short years later, Prolific Machines has raised $54.6 million in Series B funding and caught the attention of high-profile investors including the Bill Gates-funded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mark Cuban, Michael Rubin, Breyer Capital and the SALT Fund as a potential game changer in the cultivated meat industry.
PUTTING LIGHT TO WORK
To program cells to grow using light, Prolific Machines relies on a threepart system: genetics, hardware and software.
First, Prolific Machines genetically engineers cells that respond to light.
“We basically take light sensitive proteins and tether them to targets inside the cell using an amino acid linker,” Kent explains. “Once the protein is in place, you can toggle the activity of that target on and off using light.”
This gives the company a high degree of control over cell metabolism and other growth processes within cells. Then, by precisely manipulating where and when light is directed, Prolific Machines can optimize these growth processes for maximum output.
Prolific Machines uses unmodified light-sensitive proteins naturally occurring in plants. These same proteins make houseplants grow toward a sunny window — so we already consume them and know they are safe, Kent notes.
Next, Prolific Machines outfits bioreactors with lights to illuminate cells.
“The hardware can look different depending on what you’re trying to do, but we typically use LED lights,” Kent says. “There are some cases where you would use a laser. And different colors can do different things so you can use different colored lights to get orthogonal control.”
Kent notes that this light-based technology is already being used in the semiconductors that are at the heart of every smartphone, laptop and gaming system, so it is already being produced at large scale. And Prolific Machines can retrofit bioreactors with hardware so the technology can be incorporated into existing infrastructure at cultivated meat or other biotech firms.
“We want to make this technology available to anyone who wants to use it,” Kent says. “I don’t see other cultured meat companies as competitors. I see them all as future customers.”
Finally, Prolific Machines uses software to monitor and signal cell growth. Machine learning allows companies to collect real time data on how the cells are growing and fine tune the light patterns to optimize growth.
“By building cells that are light sensitive and machines that can make light, you create this shared language between machines and cells. The machine can directly communicate with the cells,” Kent says.
“Besides media costs, the other two main cost factors in cultivated meat are capex and labor costs,” Kent says. “Prolific’s systems can help address all three problems.”
Increasing the productivity of bioreactors effectively lowers capex costs over time, and the software, which creates driverless bioreactors, allows for increased automation to reduce labor costs.
THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT
Prolific Machines has already successfully produced Wagyu beef using its light-based system, and it has big plans for the future.
For instance, Kent notes that light offers spatial control that will allow the company to produce thicker whole cuts in a streamlined way without the need for scaffolding or other structural components.
“We can make structured meat products by hitting some cells with one color and others with another color to create cell differentiation,“ he says. “Imagine you have a bed of stem cells, then you hit some with red light to make muscle, some with blue light to make fat and some with green light to make bone. You can actually have all of those different tissues developing in the same place at the same time.”
This technology also holds promise for making meat in space.
“It’s going to be completely economically unviable to ship growth factors from Earth to Mars every time you want to make meat, but it’s easy to have some solar panels to make electricity to power LEDs in space. You’re going to have to do that for electricity anyway,” Kent notes. “The way that I would summarize it is that Prolific is the best option on Earth, but the only option on Mars and beyond.”
For the moment, Prolific Machines is focused on commercializing therapeutic proteins as they find their financial footing, but bringing their technology to the cultivated meat industry is in their sights within the next five to 10 years.
“Cultured meat is an inevitability,” Kent asserts. “The demand for meat is projected to double between now and 2050, and if you look at the current amount of resources that meat production takes, the math does not add up. But with Prolific’s technology, cultured meat will be economically viable and cheaper than factory farming.”
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LIGHTING THE WAY
https://library.alt-meat.net/articles/lighting-the-way