WANT TO GET THERE FASTER?

WE CAN SUGGEST A PATH.

The CMMC Advisory Service. Free for members.

Background

Besides building and applying bespoke modeling tools the industry's common challenges, the CMMC fulfills its mission to accelerate the industry by tackling another challenge; the relatively slow adoption of computational tools that already exist into R&D pipelines. These tools are industry standard in the life sciences and are available "off the shelf" now. If more companies are aware of these methods and adopt them into their existing workflow, they will realize yield gains faster. So we ask ourselves: what role could the CMMC play in supporting companies to discover, cost, and adopt these tools to speed up results?

User Story

As the CTO of a cultivated meat startup, several headwinds prevent me from investing in a robust computational modeling approach:

• My first priority isn't hiring computer modeling experts, but hiring biologists and experimentalists to develop cell lines and design our bioprocesses

• Technology changes at a rapid rate; new products and methods are developed so quickly, it can be difficult to keep pace with recent helpful developments

• My company is so busy with meeting current milestones, we don't have time to discover, evaluate, and implement computational methods

• The problem space we are tackling is so large, we don't really know which aspects of our challenge to prioritize. We also don't know which parts of our system would benefit the most from computational methods. Finding out is expensive and we aren't sure about the return on investment.

Solution

The CMMC is uniquely positioned to offer support to companies who may benefit from adopting computational methods, including...

Broad fluency in computational methods, from artificial intelligence, computational fluid dynamics, agent-based modeling, machine learning, and metabolic modeling.

Support from a community of experts, making themselves available to one another, discussing how to apply and adapt their methods specifically to the field of cultivated meat, which has its own specific challenges and goals.

Innovation, stemming from cross-pollination of methods, leading to novel solutions. By coupling together modelingtechnologies at different scales, we are able to access new dimensions of a problem space previously inaccessible to methods in isolation. 

Process

1. Discovery: we send a team of four to five computational experts who interview cultivated meat company employees in order to understand their specific challenges.

2. Mapping: the discovery team then maps out the customer's process, getting feedback from the customer as to accuracy, to ensure that the challenge space is well understood

3. Ideating: the discovery team then ideates among its members, weighing the pros and cons of various modeling methods, prioritizing ease of use, speed of adoption, and highest impact to the customer's problem space

4. Sourcing: various solutions are costed and their means of implementation are described, suggesting a pathway the customer can take to onboard computational solutions

5. Report generating: a report is written detailing the results of each step of the process with a final set of recommendations, including at least three alternate scenarios weighted according to cost and time to implement

Outputs

• A report suggesting various scenarios, including costs and time to implement, for those high impact modeling solutions most relevant to solving the customer's problem

• Among recommendations for tools that are readily adoptable, the report may also specify unique opportunities for the CMMC's modelers and experts to create novel solutions that will both support customer needs, while also suggesting broader patterns in industry standard process that will steer future project work; i.e. we will suggest the CMMC build new tools that will make a difference. These design suggestions can be spun up into new project work.

• The CMMC may suggest as a feature of the report some possible routes for implementation that the CMMC members may be able to support for the customer.

Outcomes

• 1) a better understanding of modeling and how it can improve bioprocesses 2) a better handle on modeling infrastructure available as ready-to-implement solutions 3) other custom optimization and innovation centered around modeling towards significant improvements in the target bio-process for efficiency and/or yield and/or costs and/or scaling potential etc. as well as the human capital needed to deploy those solutions /innovation.

• The CMMC will have a better understanding of client/customer problems and processes and consequently better position its projects to address the problem space of cultivated meat with increasing specificity. 

Impact

As a result of this service, customers will more rapidly iterate in their product development process, leading to faster adoption of standard tools and practices and ultimately get cultivated meat to the table faster. Additionally, this service raises the overall level of computational fluency for the industry.