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There was also a bit of hubris on our part, as we thought we could tackle the FBS replacement with the fibroblasts we still had growing in a flask. The cells were technically at their last viable split, but this flask had struggled to reach confluence, taking twice as long as the previous splits. We took a chance with it, but the results of the two FBS replacement trials proved inconclusive and were cut from the video. There will always be more tests to run, always more combinations that could be explored, but we had to draw the line somewhere and wrap up the video. Fundamentally, we’re beholden to the same factors everyone else in science is, these experiments are costly and time consuming to run. We will return to the media replacement question as it’s an essential one to answer, if we want the cost of biological research to be more affordable. Speaking of expensive, while running these experiments we finally received a long-expected package of neurons.
Affordability in biotechnology is relative, in a small laboratory a bottle of DMEM stored in a fridge is perfectly affordable even if it costs $70. It offers sterility, purity and the opportunity to replicate studies and papers published all around the world. The fact that we can replace it with some proportion of a cheap sports drink, invalidates what was on offer, as there is no way of knowing if a manufacturer will slightly alter their drinks. Their recipes aren’t made public beyond a list of ingredients, and so it’s not really an academic alternative. Now, if you’re the sort that doesn’t mind that and good enough would suffice, then yes you can cut your DMEM with your favourite flavour of sports drinks. You can also buy powdered DMEM at 1/10th the cost which you can add to DI water (something a biolab ought to have access to), but you’ve now added variability to your procedures. How certain are you of your measurements, the sterility of your mixture, would autoclaving it change its properties? Or do you need to filter it all after mixing? For a small lab, these questions are often avoided by spending the extra buck on a pre-mixed bottle. But this affordability is only relative, if you want a large-scale production of some biotech product, buying the raw elements and mixing your own growth media becomes the inexpensive alternative.
Biology has for the past few decades been going through dramatic changes, leaving the confines of academia and its own internal logic to a burgeoning industrial discipline. Many of the practices completely appropriate for a research institute concerned with the replicability of its studies do not transfer well to an industrial context, where engineering constraints like scalability, unit costs and yield become more important than how many Nines of purity a microgram sample achieved.
In any case, by exploring the question all biologists have asked; “Is DMEM just fancy Gatorade?” We determined that it’s worth it for us to explore lowering our medium cost so that we can go from growing a meat leaf to growing a burger. So, stay tuned for the next update on this project!
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