This was the world's first Cellular Agriculture Hackathon at the Imperial College Advanced Hackspace hosted by Higher Steaks and Imperial Effective Altruism.
I led my team to win, competing against a variety of Imperial students, PhDs, and professionals. We learned a ton about cultured steam cell meat and the biology behind it. The current hurdles that prevent laboratory-grown meat from becoming mainstream include high costs for the bioreactor medium, problems to scale up, difficulties to engineer tissues to resemble animal flesh and to help consumers to accept lab-grown meat as meat.
Hence, our solution, 're-medAI', uses machine learning to predict depletion and degradation of nutrients in the growing medium, making it much easier to recycle and reuse the medium.
This technology would result in a significant reduction in costs for the cellular agriculture industry, which is currently the most important step to bring lab-grown meat closer to commercial reality and into competition with real meat.