Cell Culture Media
We are back! And in the first episode of our new season, we explore growing cells for therapeutic purposes with Lonza specialists Alexis Bossie, Director of Media R&D, and Tariq Haq, Senior Director of Global Media Marketing.
Lab-grown meat is having a moment—the FDA just declared one company’s culti-vated chicken safe to eat, and another type of lab poultry was just served for dinner to delegates at this year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt. Whether this piques your pallet’s curiosity or turns your stomach, one thing is clear: growing meat in a lab for human consumption will take massive amounts of cell media.
What is cell culture media? It is the medium in which cells grow in a lab, serving as both the cell’s food and its shelter. The medium can take various forms, depending on which cell type is being grown and for what specific purpose. It is a careful re-cipe that balances the complex needs of cells in nutrients, energy, pH balance and saline percentage. Like our bodies, cell culture media is mostly water. However, crafting the right media is no simple matter: choosing the correct formula can make all the difference for the cell growth outcome, whether trying to stimulate virus pro-duction or make the tastiest animal-free cultivated cordon bleu on the planet.
Curious to Know More?
Listen to this episode of A View On, On to learn more about what it takes to grow cells in a lab. As a bonus for our listen-ers, at the end of the discussion, Alexis Bossie shares insights into the possibilities and obstacles of growing meat in the lab.
KEY TERMS:
Cell culture media is the medium in which cells grow. It must meet all environmental conditions to keep a cell alive and flourishing. Either as a liquid or gel, synthetic or organic, the cell culture media’s most important function is to deliver nutrients to cells and to wash away waste products.
The osmotic balance in cell media is the salt and water balance needed to maintain proper cell functio-ning. An imbalance creates uneven flows of water between a cell and its media, resulting in a cell burst or cell shrinkage.
A protein factory is a name given to batches of cells cultivated in a laboratory to produce high quanti-ties of one or several types of proteins, often for therapeutic purposes. It must not be confused with the cell’s own protein factory, aka the ribosome.
Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) is an aqueous extract of blood cells (amoebocytes) from the horseshoe crab, Limulus Polyphemus, that enables batch testing of vaccines and other drugs for endotoxins. The crab’s extracted blood is a surprising blue color due to the crabs’ copper-based Hamasyan. The obtained LAL is an opaque white-colored liquid that clots in the presence of any toxicity.
The metabolomics and the proteomics are the biological disciplines describing the metabolites and proteins in a cell. As these fields advance, so does the understanding of cultivating cells and developing the correct media for each type of desired growth and out-come.