Compounding Cultivation
While completing his PhD in stem cell differentiation, Viknish Krishnan-Kutty realised he wanted to apply his science directly, rather than run the risk of having his research published and archived. Fast forward to now and he is the founder and CEO of Singapore-based startup Cellivate Technologies, a startup focused on enhancing and improving cell culture efficiency through the creation of edible microcarriers. In this week’s episode we speak to Viknish about what microcarriers are, as well as how Cellivate Technologies are using them to solve industry bottlenecks. We also discuss the main benefits of microcarriers for cell-based meat companies and what the founder experience has been like for Viknish personally so far.
After his PhD Viknish spent some time quantifying how different chemicals affect skin cells. One issue he found during his work, was that cells kept peeling off and wouldn’t adhere to surfaces for long enough, which led Viknish and his team to begin exploring how different coatings can help attach cells better. Failing to find anything that was satisfactory on the commercial market, they developed their own.
Viknish: “When that project was over I moved in with the physicist [into their institute] and we were working to understand the science behind why this was happening.”
Viknish: “It was around this time that the whole cellular agriculture movement was coming about, and I realised from talking to different companies that one of the bottlenecks that they faced was something I had a solution for.”
Viknish: “We [Cellivate Technologies] see ourselves as an enabler for the cultured meat revolution.”
To fill the different gaps within the value chain Cellivate started with a platform that would allow cells to improve adhesion and accelerate growth. At the moment that means working on creating edible micro-carriers and scaffolds, as well as innovating bioreactors so that they allow for the 3D suspension of meat.
Viknish: “Now that we are not limited by the animal we can actually take this one step further … we don’t have to rely on what the animal can produce, rather we can get innovative as to how we want the meat to be.”
Viknish went on to say how after a certain stage he believes cellular agriculture will be less about replicating the meat we currently have and more about creating innovative foods.
But what is a micro-carrier? To understand micro-carriers it’s first important to know that most cells need to attach to something in order to replicate.
Viknish: “We can already see the surface area we have is a limiting factor as to how many cells we can grow.”
Viknish: “If you want to grow cells at very large scales, then we need very large surface areas which is not feasible due to space constraints and incubator sizes.”
Viknish: “Micro-carriers are about 100-200 microns in diameter, and because of their size … when we have a lot of them, the overall surface area for these cells to grow on exponentially increases.”
To put this into perspective 1g of micro-carriers provides 1000cm2 of cells.
Viknish: “The goal of these micro-carriers is to provide cells with large surface areas to grow on, whilst not taking up too much space.”
The micro-carriers don’t float or sink in the media, essentially they’re sitting in suspension, generally in a bioreactor.
Viknish: “This technology has been used for a very long time in the biotech and pharma spaces, and in those spaces there was no need for having them be edible.”
Traditionally once you would have enough cells, they’d be removed from the micro-carriers.
Viknish: “But in the case of food, we want these to be edible… because if we try to remove all the cells from the micro-carrier, it’s going to be an extra step, but also if some of these mirco-carriers get stuck within the mesh of cells then that will be a health hazard if they’re not going to be made of edible materials.”
Whilst most cells are cultivated through adhesion, there are some cell-based meat companies who don’t need their cells to attach to anything. Another way of solving this problem is using a certain enzyme to remove cells from the micro-carrier.
We also spoke to Viknish about the fact that micro-carriers accelerate cell growth all whilst maintaining vital cellular markers.
Viknish: “Within cell biology there are certain markers that can indicate if the cell is happy. One of them is morphology (how the cells look), others are protein markers within the cells (to check that the cells are viable and healthy).”
Viknish: “So when we were developing our oxide technology which allowed cells to accelerate their growth … we were checking cell markers to make sure we weren’t mutating the cells.”
Viknish: “What we found is that we actually were able to tailor these oxides so that the cells start behaving in unfavourable ways or we could tweak the marker chemistry in such a way that the cells would be healthy.”
Interestingly Viknish and his team also found that there wasn’t a one size fits all for cells in terms of the conditions that are most favourable. When you’re trying to accelerate the growth of many different cells, how do you deal with that?
Cellivate starts with sending a validation kit to potential customers. They then grow cells in this kit and send it back to the team at Cellivate so that they can understand what chemistry that particular cell likes and make suitable products.
Viknish: “It could be that at a certain point we understand this well enough that we won’t need customers to go through with the validation kit … that’s our goal.”
Now you may be wondering, is it just the faster growth of cells that’s the main benefit of micro-carriers for startups?
Whilst this was the initial position of Cellivate themselves, Viknish soon realised that not only can micro-carriers help with enhancing cell culture efficiency, but can also help with the structuring of meat through being used as scaffolds.
Alongside the emphasis on the science and technology, we also spoke to Viknish about what the founder experience has been like for him personally.
Viknish: “One of the things that I’m trying to learn is to always reflect on the milestones we have reached and celebrate those, because somehow as an entrepreneur there are so many things we want to achieve, that sometimes we overlook the stepping stones that are helping us.”
Viknish: “When I reflect back there are many many small victories we have accumulated.”
Viknish: “The journey itself can be quite long and quite stressful, so just being grateful of what we have achieved goes a long way.”
To stay up to date and learn more about Cellivate Technologies you can head to their website here, or follow Viknish directly on LinkedIn.