Media City Scientific

Rule #1 of startups is “say no to side quests.” We’ve broken that rule & here’s why: A compelling story, some cool science, and how you can help us find a cure for a three-year-old with a rare genetic condition ⤵️ TLDR: Looking for a scientist who knows about breast-milk derived stem cells. Last year, I met Kate Vinokurov,. Her story is one which no parent wants to imagine. At four days old, her son Etan stopped eating. He spent his first month of life in the hospital, struggling for his life, while his doctors struggled for answers. Ultimately, Etan was diagnosed with early-onset ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) deficiency. This impacts protein metabolism, causing a build-up of ammonia. Many babies with OTC deficiency don’t make it. Etan was very nearly one of those babies. There is no cure - just medication and diet considerations to manage the symptoms - so three years on, Etan and his family deal daily with the threat that his ammonia levels will rise and health will decline. Kate has spent the last years raising funds and awareness towards a curative therapy. One avenue for exploration is breast milk-derived stem cells; the literature suggests these cells can be differentiated into hepatocytes, which - if functional and successfully deployed therapeutically - could help her son’s body remove ammonia from his blood stream. Therapies take time and money to develop, but step one is to start. So that’s what we’ve been doing. The way I put it to my co-founder: "What is the point of having our own laboratory if we can’t donate a bit of time towards things like this?" So here's where we're at: we’ve isolated and cultured these breast milk cells, then we hope to try differentiating them into hepatocytes. Momentum is everything in startup land and we are trying to get that little bit of scientific momentum necessary to push towards developing a therapy. ➡️ Here’s where I need help: The supplies are all funded by donations from everyday people - so funding is limited and unfortunately this isn’t a paid opportunity. I’m volunteering my time and brain power on this one. I have isolated stem cells from many weird and wonderful sources over my years as a scientist (IYKYK). I know what stem cells look like, and I’d like to think I’m fairly skilled when it comes to the most demanding of cell babies. These milk-derived cells are giving me trouble; I don’t know if it’s too many immune cells in the culture or the milk is from a donor whose baby is too old, or something else. I would be extremely grateful if anyone with experience working with breast-milk derived cells is open to looking at some cell photos and sharing their thoughts. So, I turn to the internet in hopes that you might be or know the right person to speak with. Thank you 🙏🏽 If you’d like to learn more about OTC deficiency or Etan, you can check out the articles below. Thanks for reading - and fingers crossed we can move the needle on this disease in some small way.

Australian Biotech Spotlight 4/10: Media City Scientific 💥 Game-changing Aussie biotech alert! I recently came across Media City Scientific, a Sydney-based startup on a mission to make cell culture more human-relevant and animal-free and I had the pleasure of meeting Katie, their CTO, at AusBiotech. I was genuinely blown away. Katie has already played a key role at VOW, one of Australia’s most successful cellular agriculture companies, and she’s now applying that experience to tackle another critical challenge in biotech: replacing fetal bovine serum (FBS) with a chemically defined, ethical alternative. This breakthrough has the potential to reshape how scientists grow cells, test drugs, and scale sustainable biotech, while driving a more ethical and reproducible approach to research. 💥 Real science. Real impact. And it’s all happening right here in Australia. Check out their latest updates 👇 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dE-xWXwh #AustralianBiotech #CellAg #LifeSciences #Innovation #SerumFree #FutureOfScience 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dE-xWXwh #Biotech #CellAg #fuserecruitment #AustralianBiotech #SerumFree Fuse Recruitment

On the road to AusBiotech: our back seat has the toddler, the baby, and the cold box full of product ✅ I suppose someday, conference road trips will not involve Tetris-ing the Snoo into the back of the car or hourly playground breaks but we’re embracing the chaos of this business/life stage and not letting the four month sleep regression get in the way of this big week for Australian biotech. We’ll be speaking at the bioinnovation spotlight during lunch on Thursday, plus it’s a great chance to visit our wonderful Melbourne pilot testers and catch up with old friends. On the way, we’ve visited the big submarine and the big Merino. Southern NSW is beautiful country. See you soon!

It's been a truly massive 2025; if I’ve learned anything from piloting our chemically defined FBS replacement in 15+ Australian laboratories, it’s that even the most basic of cell culture activities varies between labs. Temperature, passaging reagents, thawing processes, cell culture plates; every single one of these variables impacts how cells transition to serum-free media. Unfortunately, these are exactly the kind of insights that don’t make the most exciting scientific papers. Useful insights are hidden in failed experiments that never get shared. Media City Scientific is now preparing for launch of our first product. We’ve thought a lot about how important it is to ensure the transition from FBS to our serum replacement product is super, super smooth. That’s why I’m committing to things that don’t scale; to support early adopters, I’ll offer 1:1 time with every single customer. But as we scale - even globally - we want to see that kind of tailored support scale too. That’s why we’re exploring a collaboration with Carmen Kivisild, PhD and her team at Elnora AI. Their platform is designed to capture negative data and turn it into shared knowledge, so labs can avoid repeating the same dead ends. Together, we’re asking: could the combination of deep scientific expertise and a trained GPT agent effectively support labs to transition away from serum use? We’re hoping to identify a pilot lab anywhere in the world to test this with us - you’ll get all of Media City’s scientific insights, wrapped up alongside a GPT to test whether this is an efficient way of making the transition. If your lab is considering a move away from FBS, or if you have stories about a transition-gone-poorly, let us know! Taking notes over here to make sure adoption can be super smooth ✏️

FBS is the dirty secret behind cell culture: it’s expensive, inconsistent, and regulators don’t want you using it in therapeutics anymore. Yet most labs still rely on it. But that’s about to change. Think about it. We're trying to cure cancer, develop life-saving drugs, advance human health — and we're building it all on an ingredient that: 😐 Changes composition batch to batch (contributing scientific reproducibility issues!) 🤨 Has become dramatically more expensive in the last decade 🫡 Is being rejected by regulators worldwide Deep down, most of us wish there was another way. I know how it feels in the lab. You finally get your cells growing, your protocol working, and then someone suggests you change something. My gut reaction used to be: “NEVER mess with a working protocol.” Katie and her team at Media City Scientific have built another way. Their FBS replacement (FRS) is super cool — it's a drop-in, chemically defined replacement that works with the bread-and-butter cell lines like HEK, CHO, and A549, the ones so many labs depend on.  It's not the right fit for every application - talk to Katie and she will openly share that - but for a huge number of workhorse applications, FRS is proving itself. But here’s the thing: as every scientist knows, even when a new reagent feels like magic, you still have to tweak your protocol. With FBS you’d typically use 1x antibiotics, but with FRS you should use much less. It’s not hard, but if you don’t know, you’ll waste time troubleshooting. And there are lots of small details like that. That’s why we’re joining forces.  After pilot testing with a wide variety of labs, Katie knows where the adoption challenges are. At Elnora AI, we’re building an AI co-pilot that learns from exactly these details. Together, we can make it easier for scientists to actually make the switch — without burning months on trial and error. Most people think, “I’ll do it later, when it’s a better time.” But there is never a perfect time. If your work has therapeutic potential, regulators are already signaling that change is coming. Why not get ahead now, and get more reproducible results? That’s why we’re partnering with Media City Scientific. Together we’re making the switch from FBS to FRS faster, smoother, and less painful. If your lab is considering it — whether for cost, consistency, regulatory, ethics, or sustainability — now’s the time. DM me or Katie, and let’s make it happen together. 👉 If you want more scientists to get off FBS, feel free to reshare this so it reaches more labs.

Fun fact: The cell culture media you’re probably using was invented before the moon landing. BME, 1957 DMEM, 1959 RPMI, 1966 Here we are, still using them as the defaults for human cell culture, despite the fact that we have learned so much more about the human body in the past 60-70 years. Enter Plasmax, 2019. Frankly, I’m shocked that it’s not more widely used because it’s a delightfully simple concept; profile human plasma, then recreate it in basal media form. If you want cells to behave like they do in the body, give them something that actually resembles the body. Plasmax is a great reminder that so many of the standard “best practices” we’ve inherited in science were built with the tools and knowledge of their time. As our knowledge and capabilities improve, so should our tools. Don't get me wrong, the original basal media still very much have their place, but let's select our tools deliberately rather than relying on defaults. My two cents? If you’re a scientist studying metabolism, cancer biology, or drug discovery, this is one of those innovations worth paying attention to. All the details can be found in Vande Voorde J, et al. Sci Adv. 2019 (article below)