Cell Culture Trends

Trends I’m seeing in the cell culture space lately:

→ AI meets biology is accelerating the already-in-progress trend towards chemically defined research tools. This is logical. If you’re training models using cell culture data, you want the inputs as clean and consistent as possible. For example, this makes the variability introduced by FBS more noticeable as well as problematic.

→ Completely anecdotal but there seem to be some bad batches of FBS circulating. I’m hearing from scientists who have used fetal bovine serum for years, but suddenly - despite certificates of analysis and in-house batch testing - their latest batch is testing positive for problematic viruses or has heavy precipitation/flocculants.

→ Cell culture media optimisation platforms are becoming more and more advanced. The result is highly specialised cell culture media built for specific cell types allowing for faster proliferation rates, cheaper costs per liter, and higher densities than ever.

→ Despite these advanced cell culture media, there are plenty of scientists looking for “this is easy to use and it grows the six different types of cells that my lab grows” instead. Knock out serum replacement (KSR) seems to be the best known "serum replacement", which is kind of interesting because it was designed primarily for pluripotent stem cells and usually doesn’t substitute well for serum in most other cell types.

→ In this vein: there’s increasingly a natural split between “exploratory biology media” and “production media.” Highly optimized, specialised media are necessary for high densities or cost optimisation at huge scales. But for exploratory work, operational simplicity is important; a single formulation that reliably grows a variety of cells and is sufficiently forgiving of handling variation is valuable.

→ Adherence is a sticking point (hah, I amuse myself anyway). In most serum-free media systems, coating plates with adherence proteins is the standard. This is operationally annoying relative to culturing adherent cells with serum-containing media. (Let’s do something about this, why don’t we? 😉)