Standardising Culture Medium Safety Testing for Cultivated Meat: Outputs from a Workshop and Case Study

Cultivated meat is a novel food and therefore must undergo safety assessments and regulatory review to identify risks and establish appropriate mitigations prior to commercialisation. The culture media used within the cell cultivation process may contain components that lack a long history of use in food, necessitating safety evaluation. However, there is no clearly defined framework outlining the evaluations needed to generate robust and reliable data. The aim of this work was two-fold: first, to convene a multi-stakeholder workshop to identify knowledge gaps related to culture medium safety assessment, and second, to provide a case study addressing one knowledge gap through the evaluation of ELISAs for quantifying growth factors in culture media and cultivated meat products. The workshop findings highlighted critical needs for standardised residue measurement methods, Certificates of Analysis, characterisation of metabolites and breakdown products, as well as open databases. Our case study evaluates the use of ELISAs to quantify six commonly used growth factors for cultivated meat production, comparing their presence in cultivated meat and conventional meat. Growth factor levels varied depending on the medium formulation but were generally reduced to conventional levels or were non-detectable after simulated cooking. Several methodological challenges were identified around the use of ELISAs, such as cross-reactivity between species, limited antibody availability for non-traditional species, and a lack of reference data and standards to support validation of ELISAs and establishment of suitable limits of detection. This work therefore provides actionable guidance for future research in this field for standardisation and emphasises the need for a clearly defined framework and standardised analytical methods to ensure consistent and transparent evaluation of cultivated meat.