Alagene and Prof. Tuller Lab Achieve Breakthroughs in Growth Factor Expression for Cultivated Meat

Alagene, a leader in synthetic biology and bioprocess engineering, is proud to announce significant progress achieved with the Tuller Lab at Tel Aviv University, as part of their partnership in the Cultivated Meat Consortium.

Aimed at driving down the cost of animal-free growth media, this collaboration successfully combined Alagene’s microbial engineering platform with Tuller Lab’s unique advanced computational biology tools to dramatically enhance the expression and secretion of recombinant growth factors, key components in cultivated meat production.

The results were driven by Alagene’s integrated engineering platform, which includes:

·       Custom strain design and optimization

·       High-throughput screening, enabling the evaluation of hundreds of colonies daily

·       Tailored bioassay development

·       Scalable downstream processing workflows aligned with food-grade requirements

These capabilities allowed for rapid iteration, data-driven decision-making, and efficient translation to industrial processes.

Through the Tuller Lab’s expertise in transcript design based on gene expression optimization algorithms, the teams achieved:

·       More than 5x increase in growth factor expression

·       Projected 1000-fold cost reduction for selected growth factors

·       Ready-to-scale production solutions suited for real-world applications

“Our collaboration with the Tuller Lab brought a new level of precision to protein expression in yeast,” said Dr. Neta Agmon, VP R&D at Alagene. “Their predictive algorithms, combined with our engineering and synthetic biology capabilities, helped us break through long-standing limitations and achieve commercial-grade performance.”

Alagene with its Consortium partners have now translated these breakthroughs into cost-effective, scalable production protocols for growth media components, making cultivated meat more viable and accessible.

This achievement reinforces the value of academic-industry partnerships and highlights the critical role of synthetic biology as a powerful engineering tool in shaping the future of sustainable food solutions.

Alagene continues to push the boundaries of biotechnology and welcomes further collaborations at the intersection of biology, computation, and innovation.