
The Good Food Institute has acquired cell lines and growth media from defunct startup SciFi Foods, and partnered with Tufts University to make them available for cultivated meat researchers.
In a major move to save the future food industry years of effort and millions of dollars for R&D, the Good Food Institute (GFI) has purchased cultivated meat components developed by SciFi Foods to free them up for public use.
The non-profit has bought eight bovine cell lines and two serum-free media formulations at an auction of SciFi Foods’s assets, following the Californian startup’s closure in 2024.
GFI has also partnered with the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) to store and validate the components and place them in an open-access cell bank for academia and, eventually, companies. This cell bank will be housed at the institute’s upcoming future foods innovation hub.
It marks the first time suspension-adapted bovine cell lines will be available to cultivated meat researchers globally, and is set to remove some of the preeminent barriers to market entry for industry players.
“SCiFi’s pioneering work is like a baton in a relay. Given our role in the field, GFI was able to ensure that baton didn’t drop, and through our partnership with Tufts, copies of that same baton will be handed off to scientists and startups around the world, enabling more people to join the race,” highlighted Dr Amanda Hildebrand, VP of science and technology at GFI.
How GFI snapped up SciFi Foods’s cell lines

Founded in 2019, SciFi Foods began growing cell lines for beef in 2023, developing a hybrid burger with 90% soy protein and 10% cultivated meat. It had raised $40M in funding, was in consultation with the US FDA for approval, and operated a 16,000 sq ft pilot facility, where it completed a commercial-scale production run in a 500-litre bioreactor.
The startup had hoped to enter the market by 2025, but as investors withdrew from the wider cultivated meat sector, SciFi Foods was unable to escape the headwinds. It shut down in June 2024 after running out of cash, appointing an advisory firm for the sale of its assets.
Among the parties notified of the auction were GFI and Tufts. The former’s bid was accepted in August, and the cells and media were successfully transferred to the latter for storage and distribution a month later.
“We didn’t know who else might show up for the auction, but collectively agreed it would be a shame for SCiFI’s technology to get locked in a box somewhere, so we were excited that GFI decided to bid,” said Meera Zassenhaus, director of communications for TUCCA.
The components bought by GFI include the three most commercially developed beef cell lines from SciFi Foods. These had been modified by the gene-editing technology CRISPR to ensure their ability to grow indefinitely in culture, and subsequently adapted to grow in scalable single-cell suspensions.
Two of these cell lines were further engineered to remove markers of antibiotic resistance (genes inserted in the R&D stage), making them suitable for food applications.
“When we started SCiFi Foods, we had to start from square one, beginning with a small sample of cells from a cow on an actual farm. It took us four years and tens of millions of dollars to develop these cells into commercial cell lines that grow quickly in suspension and in serum-free media,” said SciFi Foods co-founder and CEO Joshua March.
“This was a massive technical achievement… but despite our relative speed, our progress wasn’t on the time-to-revenue required in today’s VC market. Despite our disappointment that we can’t take the SCiFi burger to market, we are extremely excited by GFI’s acquisition of our cell lines and the collaboration with Tufts for use by the field.”
Open-access cell lines a ‘win-win-win’ for cultivated meat

“So many experiments currently take place in small-scale systems, and at the end of the day, those experiments can only go so far in informing large-scale, bioreactor-based processes,” said Dr Andrew Stout, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at TUCCA.
“When labs across the field have access to shared, scalable, and serum-free systems, I think it will cause a real leap in the value and applicability of their research. At the same time, I’m hopeful that these cells will also help to catalyse a broadening pattern of resource sharing and cell line optimisation across the field,” he added.
According to GFI, cultivated meat makers currently spend a significant portion of their funds and time on cell line development, which costs between $2-10M, so access to these materials could save the industry tens of millions and years of R&D, removing barriers for future startups.
Open access to these cells and the media formulations will kickstart immediate R&D work and enable studies to be run in small bioreactors, which can help researchers refine process development. Plus, their availability reduces redundancies and spurs innovation through research collaborations, and benefits B2B players like media and scaffold suppliers and bioreactor and equipment manufacturers.
“Talk about a win-win-win,” said Hildebrand. “This type of open-access jumpstart invites more people to the field, gives everyone a better starting position, and ultimately can produce more winners – companies that get more products to consumer plates, and consumers who have more choices for foods they love.”
Tufts said the cell bank will offer shared-use prototyping and scale-up research facilities, incubator lab space for startups to co-locate, and a network of experts to accelerate cellular agriculture development globally. The university is currently raising capital to build out its infrastructure to acquire and develop additional cells, including bovine, mackerel, and pork lines.
Researchers interested in the cell lines can now join a waitlist, while the media formulations are already available online. “We are essentially composting intellectual property, or IP, from an individual start-up and transforming it into a public good to benefit the entire field,” said Tufts’s Zassenhaus.
“This model of IP reuse makes sense for all kinds of technologies even beyond alternative proteins, especially as climate tech broadly faces a contraction in funding,” she added.
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