Co-founder Max Huisman works with a team member in the lab. We can make structured meat products by hitting some cells with one color and others with another color to create cell differentiation. From afar, Deniz Kent watched this conundrum play out time and again. He was working as a stem cell biol-ogist 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 optogenet-ics, a field of neuroscience where light is used to control and monitor neu-ron activity, when he was struck by a radical idea: Could the same signaling technology apply to other biological processes? Could light replace expen-sive growth media? Light, Kent reasoned, is a cheap, abundant resource. It’s inherently sterile so there’s no risk of contami-nation 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 pos-sible 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 atten-tion 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 chang-er in the cultivated meat industry. 18 Alt-Meat August 2025
Alt-Meat August 2025: Page 18
