108Labs is building the world’s first cell cultured milk Cellufacturing facility in my backyard.

Today, to accelerate cell cultured milk from lab to factory, 108Labs is beginning work on the future of cell cultured milk in my hometown and the birthplace of cell cultured human milk, Hillsborough, NC.

We moved to Hillsborough, North Carolina about 7 years ago, a year after founding 108Labs, and it’s been a wonderful place to raise my children and invent cell cultured human milk. Cows visible from my bedroom window provide a constant reminder why we’re building a future where cells instead of animals can make our milk.

Hillsborough is a wonderful small town with lots of scientist residents and rural feel only 25 minutes from Research Triangle Park, and I couldn’t be prouder of trying to show the world that a smart cell cultured milk factory can be built anywhere, in a small rural town in the middle of the US … or even on Mars someday.

Since I announced our work on Colostrupedics whole-human infant formula in March 2021 - after having created the world’s first cell cultured human milk eighteen months earlier in January 2020 - the world of cell cultured milk has grown and accelerated. TurtleTree Labs, the original Biomilk, and the other Biomilq have all raised tens millions of dollars and racing to catchup in the field 108Labs inspired in early 2020.

Biomilk even went public in April!

108Labs is still just petering along relatively quietly, the little train that could, having spent the last year exploring the therapeutic potential of human milk with secretory antibodies while staying on the cutting edge of cell cultured human milk science.

But the pace of development in the field is not fast enough, it’s been 18 months since 108Labs created the world’s first cell cultured human milk and we began work on development of Colostrupedics whole-human infant formula, and now it’s time to accelerate from lab to factory.

Culturing milk presents many novel technical challenges. The large vats used to produce almost every other type of biotechnology product in the world won’t work for culturing milk. Culturing milk requires a different type of 3d cell culture that has never been scaled to food scale or even therapeutic scale, and today cultured milk requires a constant manual effort including maintenance and monitoring and harvesting that does not scale well. Today, the cost of producing an ounce of cell cultured milk in a lab is closer to $1,000 than $1 when using off the shelf reagents and medium.

No technology exists anywhere capable of producing milk at food scale … and that’s why we’re going to build the first pilot milk Cellufacturing facility using a combination of software and hardware that can scale modularly and continuously anywhere.

108Labs actually started as a software and biotechnology company, founded by a cell biologist and organic chemist turned software developer, and we used income from software consulting to fund early cell cultured milk R&D. Today, many founders and employees and contractors and CROs and NIH cores and academic groups have worked with 108Labs to create and analyze the world’s first cell cultured milk, and our Cellufacturing facility will keep 108Labs in the lead with a strong vision for how to solve commodity cell cultured mammalian milk.

By developing and merging many software, hardware, and biosynthetic technologies such as artificial intelligence, cellular agriculture, automated factory systems, modular biomanufacturing, automated bioprocessing, and sterile packaging, 108Labs is poised to unlock food scale cell cultured milk production while reducing the costs beyond 99% per ounce.

I couldn’t be more excited to build out the first autonomous and continuously scalable milk factory that can run itself in my backyard, accepting raw medium ingredients and spitting out sterile packaged mammalian milk including the world’s first whole-human infant formula, Colostrupedics.

• by Shayne Guiliano, CEO, 108Labs, shayne@108labs.net