Foetal Bovine Serum has long been used in Australian universities, research institutes and biotech companies, but comes with major scientific, ethical, and practical problems.
Cell culture expert, Dr Katie Bashant Day, answers some key questions about the use and limitations of FBS, existing alternatives, and introduces a new animal-free alternative she has developed to replace Foetal Bovine Serum in research
What Is Foetal Bovine Serum and why does it matter?
Foetal bovine serum (FBS, also known as Foetal Calf Serum) is a substance derived from the blood of unborn calves and used to help cells grow in the lab. It’s a common ingredient in research and vaccine development. To produce FBS, blood is collected from foetuses during the slaughter of pregnant cows.
For decades, FBS has been both indispensable to scientific research and a deeply problematic reagent for scientific reproducibility. Now, after years of development and validation, a genuine replacement is finally within reach. Foetal Bovine Serum Replacement Solution (FRS) Pioneer has been painstakingly built to match FBS performance for a wide variety of its most common use cases while eliminating its scientific, ethical, and supply-chain limitations.
What are the problems with FBS?
Many scientists are concerned about FBS, yet realistic, accessible alternatives have been limited. Batch-to-batch variation forces researchers to regularly test new FBS lots or stockpile large quantities to maintain consistency. Scientific literature clearly shows that FBS variation significantly affects results, contributing to today’s reproducibility crisis.
As a major cattle-producing nation, Australia plays a role in the global supply chain for animal-derived 
biological materials, including foetal bovine serum. Although FBS is often described as a by-product of the meat industry, its production remains dependent on the slaughter of pregnant cows and the removal of their foetuses. Transparency around how foetal calf serum is sourced—both domestically and through imports—remains limited for Australian researchers and institutions.
And whilst Australia promotes the principles of the 3Rs and emphasises research integrity and reproducibility, there is no requirement to use alternatives to animal-derived reagents even when they are readily available. The continued use of FBS highlights a gap in Australian research governance, where animal use can persist indirectly even in laboratories that do not work with live animals.
Similarly, public concern about animal use in research is growing in Australia, extending beyond live animal experiments to hidden forms of exploitation in laboratory reagents. Australian universities and research institutes are increasingly expected to align their practices with community expectations around animal welfare and ethical science. Further, for therapies intended for human use, there is an obligation to prioritise animal-free systems for safety reasons
Nonetheless, demands for FBS are increasing and costs have skyrocketed.
Why build an alternative?
I’ve been culturing cells using FBS for nearly twenty years. My earliest journal club presentation centred a study in which mouse cells cultured in vitro with human serum gave a human-centric immune response. Meanwhile, human cells cultured in vitro with
mouse serum gave a mouse-centric immune response. While this covered just one disease model, it sparked an awareness/interest in the use of FBS in cell culture from the beginning of my career.
During my PhD, I saw firsthand how batch-to-batch variation in FBS disrupted research reproducibility. After joining the cultured meat startup Vow, my first role was to eliminate FBS from our cultures. Later, I led a science and engineering team developing an optimisation platform for animal-free cell culture media. Although that work focused on specialised media, I kept hearing from scientists how valuable a broadly accessible, easy, and affordable serum-free option would be. No one had created a drop-in, cost-accessible FBS replacement suitable for a wide audience—so I decided it was time to try.
Why have existing FBS alternatives not worked?
Good FBS alternatives already exist (in the form of highly optimised chemically defined media for very specific cell types). The challenge has been making them broadly accessible. They’re prohibitively expensive and a poor option for the R&D group which grows ten different cell lines, all with varied nutritional needs.
Our goal at Media City Scientific has been to make animal-free cell culture technically easy and financially attainable. a true FBS alternative; a drop-in supplement that supports reproducible research for a broad range of everyday applications. This is the gap I felt repeatedly throughout my years in research.
FBS demand will continue to rise over the next 10 years, which will drive prices up. However, we can mitigate this trend, while also improving reproducibility of our workflows, by transitioning workhorse applications (e.g. cell culture courses, expansion of cell lines, freeze media, etc) to a functional animal-free alternative.
The new alternative: FRS Pioneer
After several years of R&D at Media City Scientific we developed Foetal Bovine Serum Replacement Solution, 
‘FRS Pioneer.’ This is an animal-free, chemically defined formulation that can be used in place of FBS for a range of common applications. It contains no BSA or other animal-derived proteins. The result is complete reproducibility from batch-to-batch.
Adapting cells from serum-containing media to serum-free media has historically required substantial time and effort. FRS Pioneer was designed to mimic the makeup of FBS as much as possible; so, for most cell lines, a simple swap over of media works quite well.
What is the science behind FRS Pioneer?
We’ve published ample scientific data on our website and, as scientists ourselves, we are always happy to respond to questions about the product’s formulation or how it works.
The data was collected internally, but we also spent a year pilot-testing FRS Pioneer with external scientists to ensure it could slot into a wide variety of standard workflows (think different basal media, different passaging processes, etc.) We worked with 15 different Australian laboratories to make sure FRS Pioneer is user-friendly.
Overall, data show FRS Pioneer is a good 1:1 substitute for FBS for use in freeze media or growth of standard cell lines. It can be mixed with 1-2% FBS for more demanding primary cells; so even for cells where it’s not yet a perfect substitute, FRS Pioneer can dramatically reduce the amount of FBS used in culture. Scientists have been particularly interested in using FRS Pioneer for cleaner assays.
Why is FRS Pioneer Revolutionary?
There are many use cases where FBS no longer needs to be the default. This includes freeze media, cell culture courses, expansion of many of the bread-and-butter cell lines used for research or drug discovery, and standard assays. The result is a stepwise improvement in reproducibility and consistency. Labs can avoid batch-testing and stockpiling FBS in the hopes of maintaining one batch throughout a given study. Global collaborations based on consistent cell culture will become simpler and, in the future, labs will be able to replicate scientific studies published years ago.
Even for nutritionally demanding primary cells which still require some FBS for culture, dropping the FBS concentration from 10-20% to 1-2% dramatically extends the length of time a given batch of FBS will last, further improving consistency.
By moving just some of the workhorse applications of FBS to a broad spectrum alternative, demands for FBS won’t grow as dramatically as projections forecast, impacting its price. FRS Pioneer is currently priced on par with premium FBS, but its costs will drop as recombinant protein technology improves.
Of course, the ethical and sustainability angles are just as important…yet I’ve seldom met a scientist who loves the idea of where FBS comes from!
How can researchers access FRS Pioneer?
Addressing the use of animal-derived reagents is an essential step toward genuinely animal-free research systems, and an opportunity for Australia to lead the charge in scientifically robust cell culture practices.
FRS Pioneer is available now through Media City Scientific, with our first commercial batch to be shipped to customers in February 2026. For the first six months, we will be focusing on the Australian and NZ markets to ensure we can provide one-to-one support for every scientist who wants to trial going serum-free. From there, we will likely partner with distributors to make FRS Pioneer globally accessible.
⭐ Want to know more? Visit AFSA’s page on FBS here.
About the Author
Dr Katie Bashant Day is a biomedical scientist by training and co-founder of Media City Scientific, a company developing advanced technologies to replace animal-derived materials in research. Katie holds a PhD in Medicine and has extensive experience leading innovation in cell culture systems, tissue engineering, and serum-free technologies. Passionate about advancing ethical, high-quality science, Katie is an advocate for replacing animal-sourced ingredients like FBS with defined, consistently reliable alternatives.