We reached out to Dr. Gasser to gain an expert perspective on the current frontiers of K. phaffii chassis improvement — particularly in metabolic engineering, folding, and stress-response pathways.

When asked about industry concerns over polymannose contamination in high-cell-density cultures, she noted that this was not yet a major issue raised by industry, although academic work has begun exploring its effect on yield and purification. She confirmed that streamlining sugar metabolism remains a promising route for improving titres.

Dr. Gasser also pointed out bottlenecks in producing heterologous proteins with multiple disulfide bonds, which can lead to ER-associated degradation or cell lysis. While overexpressing UPR proteins or chaperones can sometimes mitigate this, she explained that such strategies rely on combinatorial tuning and are rarely generalisable — leading us to deprioritise this avenue for iGEM’s scope.

On fermentation, she described how most industrial K. phaffii processes still rely on fed-batch methanol systems but that continuous fermentation using other feedstocks such as glucose is gaining attention. Although we could not test this experimentally, this insight informed our understanding of future K. phaffii bioprocess design directions.

Finally, Dr. Gasser mentioned emerging initiatives — such as grants targeting “$10 per kg” monoclonal antibody production from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — that motivate cost reduction for complex protein production. This highlighted new potential beneficiaries of a more efficient K. phaffii chassis, beyond cultivated meat applications.

We reached out to Dr. Prudence during his time at Better Dairy to better understand the challenges faced by startups developing commercial yeast strains under industrial constraints.

He emphasised a key obstacle: the crowded and restrictive IP landscape surrounding industrially useful yeast strains. Many strains are protected by commercial licences held by large contract manufacturers, leaving startups that cannot afford licensing at a disadvantage. This reinforced our later interest in **open-license strain development** and transparency in strain characterisation.

We reached out to Dr. Prudence during his time at Better Dairy to better understand the challenges faced by startups developing commercial yeast strains under industrial constraints.

He emphasised a key obstacle: the crowded and restrictive IP landscape surrounding industrially useful yeast strains. Many strains are protected by commercial licences held by large contract manufacturers, leaving startups that cannot afford licensing at a disadvantage. This reinforced our later interest in **open-license strain development** and transparency in strain characterisation.

Dr. Prudence also discussed the **tension between venture capital timelines and scientific progress**. Companies are often expected to generate revenue while still scaling up operations, widening what he called the “valley of death” for biotech ventures. He advised that the best strategy is to develop **revenue-generating components within a university context** before spinning out — a model we found particularly relevant to iGEM teams.

We also discussed **downstream processing bottlenecks**, which he identified as a major scaling barrier in the UK due to a lack of affordable, food-grade biomanufacturing facilities. This echoed concerns from later consultations, showing that even well-engineered strains cannot succeed without appropriate industrial infrastructure.

Our focus was understanding the key challenges in industrial K. phaffii applications and the broader landscape of cultivated meat media companies.

Reka shared her experience overseeing growth factor production pipelines and validated our emphasis on IGF-1, EGF, and HGF as high-demand targets in cultivated meat. She noted that while IGF-1 and EGF are smaller and easier to express, HGF poses significant difficulties due to its complex multi-chain structure and susceptibility to cleavage. She recommended we include FGF2 as an easier, more stable target with strong industrial relevance — advice that shaped our final experimental design.

Reka also discussed her previous company’s work in engineering growth factors for improved dose-response properties, showing us an alternate approach to reducing production costs. However, given our focus on strain engineering and bioprocess design, we decided not to pursue protein modification within the iGEM timeframe.

The second part of our conversation turned to industry and public perception. Reka explained that attention within the sector is shifting towards media composition and sustainability, with increasing interest in waste-derived carbon sources. At the same time, she noted a growing public fatigue and investor caution towards alternative proteins — a realism that encouraged us to tailor our outreach and educational materials to address these perceptions more directly.

Overall, her insights helped us balance ambition with practicality, refine our target protein list, and develop a grounded communication strategy aligned with the current state of the industry.

We reached out to Dr. Yu to refine our CRISPR-Cas9 design strategy for K. phaffii and ensure our approach was viable within iGEM constraints. At this stage, we had identified gene targets and designed initial sgRNAs with the goal of modifying Kozak sequences to tune expression levels. After reviewing our plan, Dr. Yu advised us to **abandon multiplexed editing**, which could cause metabolic strain and reduce viability, and instead focus on **single edits with clear functional endpoints**.

Through multiple discussions, we pivoted toward **Cas9-mediated gene insertions under inducible promoters** rather than promoter modifications. Dr. Yu also introduced us to a **ΔKu70 strain of K. phaffii**, which improves homologous recombination efficiency, and he kindly provided us with aliquots of this strain for our experiments.

One of the most impactful contributions was his recommendation to incorporate **electroporation** into our transformation workflow — a method none of us had previously used — which ultimately enabled successful DNA delivery and stable integration. He also provided insights on **primer design** for integration verification and explained how to interpret ambiguous gel results for CRISPR construct validation.

Dr. Yu’s ongoing mentorship shaped both our wet lab execution and our understanding of how to translate genetic edits into industrially meaningful outcomes. He continued advising us throughout the summer and was formally onboarded as a project advisor.

From his time pivoting away from K. phaffii-based growth-factor production, Brandon Ma shared first-hand insight into the challenges of an overcrowded IP landscape, CMO dependencies, and complex patent restrictions. He encouraged us to frame our proof-of-concept around reducing impurity production rather than pursuing full purification within the iGEM timeframe, aligning our objectives with realistic industrial outcomes.

He also gave practical guidance for working with K. phaffii: beginning with the wild-type CBS 7435 strain, using small DNA constructs (~80 ng), and validating >100 clones via dot-blot screens. Although infeasible for our scale, this insight clarified the standards of industrial workflows. Brandon also shared troubleshooting advice — from monitoring pellet colour and smell to dual-antibiotic selection for contamination control.

For CRISPR design, he advised manually verifying primer targets against the K. phaffii genome via NCBI, ordering redundant primer sets, and sequencing ambiguous bands for validation. He recommended software tools for codon optimisation and suggested comparing multiple optimised variants to assess expression efficiency.

In terms of targets, he advised prioritising EGF and IGF because of their higher stability and flagged HGF as particularly unstable due to its multi-chain structure. He proposed FGF2 as a more reliable and scalable protein, which we subsequently added as a verification target for our recombinant-protein workflow.

Overall, Brandon’s consultation reframed our technical aims around practicality, helping us design experiments that could translate directly into industrial relevance.

Our consultation with Dr. Perez-Carrasco focused on adapting Bayesian optimisation for use in biological systems — specifically, the challenges of fitting noisy wet-lab data to dynamic models. He recommended that we first create a synthetic dataset using simplified ODE systems with Gaussian noise before introducing heteroscedastic variation, ensuring that our optimisation function behaved as expected under controlled noise.

He highlighted the use of PyMC as a powerful tool for Bayesian inference, allowing us to extract experimentally derived parameters and feed them back into the model iteratively. This approach, he explained, would strengthen the connection between simulation and experiment — an essential step for data-driven model refinement.

Additionally, he reminded us that **biological noise must be contextualised**: fluctuations can arise not only from measurement error but also from population heterogeneity or metabolic state changes. To ensure biological validity, he advised maintaining cultures strictly within the log-growth phase and avoiding over-crowding, since that would shift metabolic profiles and confound results.

Finally, Dr. Perez-Carrasco provided key literature references on noise modelling and suggested using small-scale test cases to benchmark our pipeline before applying it to real data — an approach that later defined the early validation stage of our dry-lab workflow.

His initial advice centred on repeatability and managing experimental variance. We were encouraged to vary stimulus/environmental properties while avoiding introducing genetic variation (higher time/resource cost). He flagged inducer concentration accuracy as a common issue with small volumes, prompting us to use larger dispensed volumes and bulk preparation to minimise confounders and improve cross-trial comparability.

Finally, we simplified the experimental design, leaning on established techniques and straightforward workflows. On short timelines, he advised against designing our own OpenTron automation protocol, so we kept focus on a solid proof-of-concept experiment.

Dr. Martina Miotto is the cofounder of CellRev, a company that stopped trading recently. She shared her experience building a company that initially focused on cellular agriculture before ultimately pivoting towards pharma. Her journey highlighted both the promise and the pitfalls of the cultivated meat industry: despite developing a high-yield, continuous adherent cell manufacturing process and securing strong pharma trial partners, her team faced declining investment in cellular agriculture and long decision timelines after pivoting towards pharma, leading to the company’s closure.

Martina emphasised the harsh realities of the current investment climate, overpromising by cultivated meat companies, waning investor confidence, and the particular difficulty of raising funds for enabling technologies rather than consumer-facing products.

From this, she advised us to carefully balance diversification with focus, explore quicker market entry points, and prioritise revenue generation strategies such as non-dilutive funding and B2B-focused investors. Most importantly, she encouraged us to simplify our narrative for non-technical stakeholders and to critically evaluate the implementation challenges of our chosen market. Her candid reflections offered us invaluable perspective on both strategic pitfalls and resilience in biotech entrepreneurship, and allowed us to highlight issues with the cultivated meat industry through our work, helping shape the way we frame Growf’s pathway to impact.

With deep experience in strategic communications from her time at McKinsey and later at Lightspeed, Victoria Faber helped us elevate our pitch deck into a coherent, persuasive story that aligned with investor expectations.

She guided us to structure the deck as a high-level narrative — beginning with a bold problem statement, followed by a visionary solution and a clearly defined strategic edge. She emphasised that the flow of a pitch deck should engage emotionally before delving into technical depth.

We worked through the presentation slide by slide, simplifying dense technical descriptions into accessible language without sacrificing credibility. Victoria also stressed the importance of visual clarity, advising us to leverage whitespace, icons, and short thematic headlines to maintain reader attention.

Her detailed feedback led us to rebuild the deck with a more intuitive layout and clearer value proposition, replacing data-heavy visuals with strategic summaries that could be absorbed within seconds.

These changes not only elevated our investor materials but also shaped how we communicated our project across all outreach — from sponsor emails to conference presentations.

The two meetings with Victoria were transformative, marking our shift from a purely scientific mindset to one focused on storytelling, vision, and strategy.

Nelli Morgulchik provided precise and pragmatic advice grounded in her years of experience as a venture capitalist and angel investor. She recommended that we separate our pitch deck from any detailed fundraising documents, explaining that mixing them can blur messaging and weaken narrative focus. Investors, she noted, want to see a clearly defined vision and differentiation before being asked to engage with numbers.

Nelli also encouraged us to incorporate a pricing and competitor analysis slide that benchmarks our solution against existing market offerings. Demonstrating a quantifiable cost or performance advantage would make our project’s relevance far clearer to industry stakeholders.

She advised breaking our development plan into short-term milestones and a long-term roadmap supported by measurable KPIs, making it easier for investors to assess risk and progress. This structure, she explained, reflects professional fundraising standards and inspires greater confidence in execution ability.

Beyond strategy, Nelli introduced us to industry contacts at Multus and Hoxton Farms, helping us secure further stakeholder consultations that strengthened our technical validation.

After implementing her feedback, we restructured our deck, added a detailed pricing analysis, clarified our differentiation, and reframed our narrative to centre more on cultivated meat scalability than on abstract innovation. Her mentorship was key in aligning our communication with investor expectations and setting up a more focused fundraising approach.

In our first meeting early in the project, Olivia Brown encouraged us to think beyond the science and identify our business edge. She asked key questions about who our customers are, what differentiates us, and how scalable our solution could become — pushing us to articulate not just feasibility, but market relevance.

Olivia stressed the importance of conducting market and competitor analyses before attempting any entrepreneurial outreach. Following her advice, we designed a stakeholder interview plan and distributed consumer surveys to validate assumptions about growth-factor accessibility and cultivated-meat economics.

She also introduced us to several internal resources at Imperial — including the Startup Directory, Founder Slack community, EIT Food, and the Food Student Research Network — all of which expanded our network and helped us connect with potential collaborators and mentors.

In our second consultation, closer to the Jamboree, Olivia helped us refine our pitch presentation. She emphasised maintaining a balance between scientific credibility and business clarity and urged us to broaden our framing beyond cultivated meat to include wider biomanufacturing applications. This pivot positioned our work as a flexible production platform rather than a single-industry product, improving our narrative for potential investors.

Olivia also guided us through IP considerations and introduced us to the Enterprise Lab’s Expert-in-Residence network, giving us access to over 100 specialists for targeted feedback.

Her mentorship helped bridge the gap between our technical research and business viability, ultimately shaping how we positioned the project for long-term impact.

During our consultation with Katie Moruzzi, Imperial Expert-in-Residence and Associate at Briffa - Intellectual Property Lawyers, we learned about the five main categories of IP protection: trademarks, copyright, registered designs, patents, and confidential know-how. We also discussed the trade-offs between filing patents and relying on trade secrets. Patents can provide strong protection but are costly (around £5,000 per country), require public disclosure, and must be expanded internationally within a strict 6-month window. Trade secrets, by contrast, avoid disclosure and costs, but only work if the invention cannot be easily reverse-engineered.

Additionally, as yeast engineering is highly patented, we have to confirm novelty and freedom-to-operate before filing. We were advised to perform prior searches, check our names and logos against UK Companies House and IPO databases, and speak with SynBio-specialist patent attorneys, which we have immediately taken upon doing.

Another key complication we would encounter is company formation: as international students, we cannot immediately incorporate in the UK, which risks fragmenting ownership if IP is held individually, hence we would have to look into alternative ways of incorporation.

She briefed us on patentability criteria, specifically how unique gene knockout combinations could be patentable if they produce unexpected synergistic effects. We also discussed patenting practices across different jurisdictions (US, UK, China). She recommended the European Patent Office as our primary venue because it is more favourable than the US due to narrower prior-art rules. However, the filing timeline was a major barrier: we would need a UK priority filing within days to avoid conflicts with iGEM deadlines. While minimal preliminary data would suffice for an initial filing, ownership uncertainty with Imperial complicated matters — Imperial could retain ownership and cover costs, disclaim ownership and leave costs to us, or negotiate shared ownership. After considering these factors, and staying aligned with our commitment to open science, we decided not to pursue patent protection, ensuring our work remains accessible to future iGEM teams while we focus on immediate project impact.

With the cultivated meat industry facing significant challenges post-2022, such as rising interest rates, reduced venture funding, and an increase in acquisitions, he stressed the importance of adapting the narrative to address these shifts. Pedro encouraged the team to expand the focus of the K. phaffii platform, positioning it as a versatile tool for broader biomanufacturing applications, such as vaccine protein production. This reframing would allow the project to appeal to a wider range of industries and investors, especially those with more immediate needs.

His input led to important changes in the pitch deck, notably shifting from specific cost figures to broader performance metrics. Instead of quoting exact prices, Pedro recommended highlighting efficiency gains (e.g., 3× improvements), which provide a more credible and flexible narrative. He also advised revising technical terminology, using “protein secretion” to better convey the platform’s broader capabilities.

Pedro also guided the go-to-market strategy, recommending an initial focus on applications like vaccine manufacturing other than cultivated meat production, where there’s clearer demand for protein expression tools. However, due to iGEM deliverables and village constraints, we couldn't implement this dual-focus approach and instead maintained our original target segment: the cultivated meat industry.

Additionally, emphasised the importance of identifying target customers and showcasing real or potential partnerships to strengthen traction. Finally, Pedro encouraged exploring strain IP licensing as a short-term revenue model before developing proprietary growth factors. His contributions helped refine the project’s approach to both the market and investors, ensuring it was better aligned with the industry's current dynamics.

The session offered a firsthand experience of presenting an early-stage biotech idea to a seasoned investor, allowing us to receive direct feedback on key aspects like vision, technical feasibility, and market potential. Hugh's feedback particularly challenged us to clarify the long-term impact of our project, especially in the context of food and synthetic biology.

One of the most significant takeaways was the importance of a clear, focused narrative. Hugh asked us to pinpoint exactly what we were offering: Is it the cultivated meat, the growth factors, or the engineered chassis? This forced us to re-evaluate our messaging and ultimately narrow our focus to growth factors applied specifically to cultivated meat. This shift helped simplify our value proposition, making it more tangible and aligned with market needs.

Beyond refining our pitch, this exercise also taught us critical lessons in designing future stakeholder engagements. Whether interacting with policymakers, startup accelerators, or other potential investors, we learned how to position our project more effectively and communicate its value. The session underscored the need for a clear, cohesive story that resonates with different audiences, helping us refine both our approach to future pitches and how we position ourselves within the broader biotech ecosystem.