FRS Pioneer Now Available

Scientists, I’ll level with you: when I started sharing publicly about building a biotech company without raising VC, it was easy to imagine what a post describing the wrap up of company operations would look like. It was much harder to imagine commercial launch…and yet here we are. Happy launch day. 🥂

One morning a few months ago, something pretty cool happened: Media City Scientific made our first sale. In the afternoon, something even cooler happened: we made our second sale.

Today we publicly launch FRS Pioneer - a chemically defined, animal-free replacement for fetal bovine serum (FBS) that’s drop-in and easy to use.

How did we get here?

➡️Obsession: indulge me because the word is bandied about, but the formula was a labor of love. I clocked eight days away from a biosafety cabinet in 2025. Four of them were after I gave birth.

➡️Support from Australian scientists: When not in our lab, I was in external labs. We dedicated an entire year to piloting FRS, swapping it directly for FBS across a range of every-day activities in different lab setups. Varied processes for passaging, dilution in different basal media, mixing freeze media, running standard assays, growing cell lines, other cell types, and more.

To break a 50+ year old FBS habit, FRS needed to be genuinely user-friendly, and our earliest pilot testers are the real MVPs for helping us get there.
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FRS Pioneer is not a perfect replacement for fetal bovine serum for every use case, but I’ve been around the entire block when it comes to serum-replacement. I haven’t found anything that comes close to matching its ease of use or broad functionality. Our earliest users have started re-ordering and have encouraged me to launch, so here we are.

Our website has data. We’re open for orders. With every order, you’ll get personalized, hands-on support from Katie. We make going serum-free or serum-reduced easy - whether that involves FRS Pioneer, your own in-house media development efforts, or something else.

We are an Australian company that will start small but scale globally. We’re scientists too, so talk to us if you want our honest opinion on how FRS Pioneer will perform in your system.

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There are many people reading this who have pushed us along in small and large ways. Thank you. A few years ago, we were quite literally dry walling an R&D lab. Last week, we were putting the final touches on our ISO documentation, negotiating supply chain agreements, and talking to cGMP facilities. There’s a big lift to go, and there will certainly be challenging days ahead, but I’ve become quietly convinced it’s all possible.