In-Vitro Meat / Leather Bioreactor

So, this may be slightly embarrassing.  Some time ago, during a research project in tissue engineering, we made an error while putting one of our customized bioreactors together.  By pure accident, some fluid lines led to the wrong positions, and some cells ended up in the wrong place.  Initially we thought our experiment had failed, and everything in it had somehow died.  But, much to our suprise, we discovered that the cells had survived in their erroneous environment, and had been induced to grow into a strange sheet-like structure.  This accident revealed to us a completely unique bioreactor design that can cause cells of any mammalian type to grow into large, strong and thick sheets.  

Prototype

Tasty?  

These images show a prototype we produced some time ago.  Could it become an animal-free leather emblem on your mobile phone case?  Or perhaps it might go better as the interior of a meaty animal-free burger?

Characteristics

While we are still working on fully exploring the limits of this technology, some of its characteristics are known today:

- The cells exhibit an organic adhesion to each other, both laterally and vertically, giving them the elastic strength characteristic of living tissues.

- Sheets can be of controlled thickness, up to a few millimeters.

- There is no obvious limit to the lateral size (length / width) of the sheets.

- The sheets are under direct selection to become uniformly smooth and watertight.

- This was grown using in-house serum-free, animal-component-free medium.  

- It's inexpensive.  The prototype above is about the size of 2 quarters stacked, and cost under $10 in consumable materials (using our in-house serum-free media).  This seems to stack up surprisingly favorably against Sergey Brin's recent $330,000 investment in a lab-grown hamburger. 

Business Situation

The sheet-growing bioreactor is under active development.  We will release further updates when we are ready.