UPSIDE Foods spins out Lucius Labs to commercialize cell culture media expertise

UPSIDE Foods had launched Lucius Labs, a new spinoff business focused on cell culture media and analytical services for life sciences applications, marking a move to commercialize capabilities developed during the company’s work on cultivated meat.

• UPSIDE Foods launched Lucius Labs as a standalone spinoff focused on cell culture media and analytics.

• The new venture targeted applications across human and animal health, including cell therapy and vaccine production.

• Lucius Labs drew on media development expertise built during UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated meat scale-up.

Lucius Labs looks like it has been established to supply cell culture media and analytical services to customers across human and animal health, including stem cell therapy, tissue engineering, cell and gene therapy, organoid production, viral vector manufacturing, vaccine production, and antibody development.

The company appears to be positioning its offering as an alternative to what it described as legacy approaches to cell culture media development, which it characterized as slow, expensive, and poorly suited to modern bioprocessing needs. Lucius Labs said it could deliver custom media formulations in as little as two to four weeks by applying a different approach to raw material characterization and qualification.

Dr Bob Newman, Chief Science Officer at UPSIDE Tech and a member of the Lucius Labs leadership team, said the company had rethought how media development was approached. “Bringing together an expert team to reinvent media development solved for huge barriers,” Newman said. “Our significant benefits in cost and custom formula turnaround time, without any drawbacks to performance, unlock massive potential for life-saving technologies. We’re setting the new standard in media.”

The Lucius Labs team brings together experience spanning cultivated meat, therapeutic bioprocessing, and analytical chemistry. Kalle Johnson has spent more than two decades optimizing media and processes for therapeutic and cultivated meat bioprocessing across multiple species and cell types. Dr Cameron Copeland has more than eight years of experience developing and optimizing cell culture media and led media development at UPSIDE Foods.

Brian Wong contributes more than a decade of experience scaling media production from small-scale R&D through to GMP manufacturing, while Dr Sofia Pezoa brings a background in stem cell and developmental biology, with experience developing media for stem cells, immune cells, and cultivated meat applications.

Alongside its media portfolio, Lucius Labs launched an analytics platform covering amino acid profiling, mineral analysis, and full elemental characterization. The company highlighted reduced biomass requirements and faster turnaround times as key differentiators, supported by a team with more than 40 years of combined analytical chemistry experience.

Dr Judith Denery, Director of analytical R&D, and Dr Courtney Tanabe, Scientist in analytical R&D, lead assay development and quality initiatives across the platform, which targeted applications in food technology, synthetic biology, and health.

The launch of Lucius Labs follows a period of operational refocusing at UPSIDE Foods as the cultivated meat company adjusted its near-term plans in response to a more constrained funding environment. In 2025, UPSIDE confirmed it had streamlined operations to prioritize commercialization and scale while remaining agile, including pausing plans to build a large production facility in Illinois in favor of expanding its smaller EPIC site in California, as previously reported by AgFunderNews.

According to AgFunderNews, UPSIDE Foods remains the most well-funded company in the cultivated meat sector, having raised US$608 million since its founding, according to AgFunder data. While the company secured US regulatory approval for its whole-cut cultivated chicken, it previously acknowledged that large-scale production of whole cuts was not yet commercially viable. It has since highlighted hybrid approaches that combine cultivated cell biomass with plant-based ingredients, although those products have not yet secured regulatory approval.

By spinning out Lucius Labs, UPSIDE appears to be separating a set of capabilities developed for cultivated meat into a standalone business targeting established life sciences markets, where demand for optimized, cost-effective cell culture media already existed. The move allowed the company to pursue opportunities beyond food while keeping its cultivated meat program intact.

On its website, Lucius Labs describes its mission as redefining what cell culture media could achieve by lowering costs, increasing speed, and enabling a wider range of bioprocessing applications across industries.