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TEAM IMPERIAL

Food For The Future.

The Future is Grown.
Not Slaughtered.

Lab grown steak in a petri dish
Store shelves with meat

Store bought meat can be directly linked to
harmful farming practices such as:

  • DEFORESTATION
  • EXCESSIVE ANTIBIOTIC USE
  • EXCESSIVE EMISSIONS
Cows in poor conditions

FAILED PROMISE

Cultivated Meat

We were promised cultivated meat; providing the same meat experience without the deadly impacts.

BUT WHERE IS THE SOLUTION?

Problem icon THE ONGOING PROBLEM

0

kg of CO₂ equivalents emitted each year by the meat industry

Cut down trees

THE ETHICAL PARADOX

Every purchase of store-bought meat supports a system that harms animals through:

  • SYSTEMIC CRUELTY IN FACTORY FARMS.
  • OVERCROWDING AND CONFINEMENT.
  • ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE AND SUPPLY CHAIN INSECURITY
Meat store
Cage

INNOVATION HELD HOSTAGE

  • Scaling cultivated meat is impossible while recombinant growth factors make up 70% of media costs.
  • Without a cost-effective protein expression platform, the industry cannot achieve price parity.
  • To break this bottleneck, we have engineered a solution using K. Phaffii as our expression chassis.

Cost of Production (/kg)

Tesco Finest Beef Rump Steak
£25
Sainsbury's British Mature Rump Steak
£20
Waitrose Premium Fillet Medallions
£62
Broader UK Sirloin / Ribeye / Fillet
£25-30
Cultivated Meat [1] Current Best Estimate
~£55

OUR SOLUTION

WE HAVE ELIMINATED THAT BARRIER

With our hero strain, MANNOLess, we’re tackling multiple bottlenecks in biomanufacturing.

By genetically rewiring industrial K. phaffii’s high impurity secretion, we overcome limiting barriers to efficient protein production: downstream processing and metabolic efficiency.

  • Boosting process yield and efficiency
  • Reducing downstream processing cost
  • Enabling scalable, cost-efficient manufacturing

Ultimately, we enable the cultivated meat industry by providing a sustainable, animal-free platform for growth factor production, disrupting the world's dependency on animal agriculture.

pichia-pastoris
Sustainable Icon

SUSTAINABLE & OPEN

Enabling open-source, UK-based bio-manufacturing, & supporting Net Zero targets across the food and health sector.

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Low Cost Icon

LOW COST & SCALABLE

Slashing the main contributor to cultivated meat production costs by 80% through our improved engineered strain.

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Modular Icon

MODULAR
SYSTEMS

Perfected pattern, performance & adaptability engineered using synthetic biology.

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MEDALS CHECKLIST

CLICK ON ANY COLORED REQUIREMENT TITLE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW OUR TEAM ACHIEVED IT.

Bronze Medal Image

BRONZE

  • Competition Deliverables — Complete Wiki, Presentation Video, Judging Form and Judging Session.
  • Project Attributions — Describe team and external contributions using the Project Attributions Form.
    • Table 1: Team Member Contributions
    • Table 2: External Contributions
    • Table 3: Project Timeline
  • Contribution — Make a useful contribution for future iGEM teams.
Silver Medal Image

SILVER

  • Engineering Success — Demonstrate technical engineering success through one iteration of the design cycle.
  • Human Practices — Explain how your work is responsible and beneficial for the world.
Gold Medal Image

GOLD

  • Excellence in Synthetic Biology — Demonstrate excellence in General Biological Engineering and at least one Specialization.
    • Best Education
      • Establish mutual learning and dialogue.
      • Document work for future teams to build upon.
      • Enable broader participation in synthetic biology.
    • Best Integrated Human Practices
      • Explain how work is responsible and beneficial.
      • Demonstrate integrated Human Practices throughout.
      • Implement thoughtfully with context and prior references.
      • Show how activities shaped a responsible project.
      • Incorporate diverse stakeholder views.
      • Document thoroughly for future teams.
      • Create an inspiring example for future iGEM teams.
    • Best Model
      • Develop an impressive and insightful model.
      • Use modeling to gain system-level understanding.
      • Incorporate real data into model development.
      • Document approach clearly for reuse by future teams.

[1] Garrison, G. L., Biermacher, J. T. & Brorsen, B. W. (2022) ‘How much will large-scale production of cell-cultured meat cost?’, Journal of Agriculture and Food Research, 10, p. 100358. doi:10.1016/j.jafr.2022.100358.