Growing meat from animal cells means keeping those cells fed, and the liquid that feeds them is the single largest running cost in the process. Most of it gets used once. The cells take what they need and release ammonia and lactate as they go, until the liquid turns hostile and the batch is thrown out. What leaves the tank is still full of useful nutrients, and it is also loaded with nitrogen and phosphorus, which makes disposal its own problem: released untreated into rivers, those are exactly the compounds that trigger algal blooms. The expense and the waste stream are one problem seen from two angles.
Turning yesterday's broth into tomorrow's
BTL Healthcare Technologies' patent application [WO2026139830A1] sets out to reuse spent medium rather than discard it. The filing calls the result rejuvenated culture medium, and describes two ways of getting there.
The more striking route puts yeast to work. Yeast is cultured directly in the spent liquid, where it consumes the ammonium, urea and lactate that made the medium toxic in the first place. The filing reports it grew at least as well there as in YPD, the standard broth yeast is normally cultured in. It is then harvested and broken down into peptides and amino acids that become an ingredient in fresh medium. The waste of one organism becomes the food of the next, and the cleaned-up liquid can go back into the process.
The simpler route skips the yeast. Spent medium is filtered, concentrated to drive off water, then blended back with fresh medium and topped up with the nutrients the cells consumed. In the worked example, one part spent medium to two parts fresh supported cell growth comparable to entirely fresh medium, and kept doing so when the cycle was repeated over several rounds. This route dilutes the waste products rather than removing them, so it trades completeness for simplicity.
Worth knowing that the evidence sits unevenly across the two. The blending route is demonstrated end to end. The yeast route is shown in convincing pieces, with the full loop not yet closed in a single experiment.
One number gives a sense of the scale involved. Spent medium is 95 to 99.9 percent water, and the filing describes concentrating it around fifteen-fold, with the evaporated water recovered clean enough to use again.
A device maker that quietly built a meat company
BTL, founded in 1993, makes medical equipment for physiotherapy, cardiology and aesthetic medicine, with offices in more than ninety countries. In 2020 it founded and solely funded Bene Meat Technologies in Prague, which in November 2023 became the first company anywhere registered to produce and sell cultivated meat for pet food in the EU. This filing belongs to a patent family stretching back to early 2023, so it reflects a sustained programme rather than a first step.
Props to the inventors: Jiří Janoušek, Kateřina Heřmanová, Hana Raschmanová, Anna Kohoutová, Petr Bubeníček, Marek Popov, Anežka Sigmundová, Markéta Verešová, Sára Šedivá and Zuzana Ježková, for treating spent medium as a resource rather than an outflow.
About the Author
I'm Pieter Labuschagne, Head of Technology at Newform Foods, where I work across strategy, R&D, and partnerships. With a background in biotechnology, I'm drawn to new technologies, interesting problems, and the challenge of turning ideas into real-world solutions. I enjoy building things from the ground up and connecting with the people behind them. Based in Cape Town, usually somewhere between a laptop, a surfboard, and a guitar.
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This article is based on publicly available information. Lab Grown Technologies is not affiliated with the inventors or organisations mentioned.
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