Waterloo Pharmacy grad student wins $10K GreenHouse Social Impact Fund Prize
Nicholas Cheng (MSc in Pharmacy in progress) won the Winter 2023 Social Impact Fund Grand Prize for his project Entomatia, which uses food waste as feed for mealworms to extract a serum to replace fetal bovine serum (FBS).
The $10,000 prize from the GreenHouse Social Impact Fund will be used for infrastructure costs and to generate a prototype serum for further scale-up.
L-r: Dr. Richard Myers, principal of United College, Nicholas Cheng and Tania Del Matto, GreenHouse director.
Cheng was sharing a car ride with some friends discussing potential research ideas when a conversation about FBS began.
FBS is extracted from the blood of cow fetuses and is used by researchers from a variety of disciplines to propagate cell growth. The costly process is not vegan-friendly or slaughter-free with many animal rights concerns.
“We started talking about bug-based food sources for the growing population and wondered if we could make an alternative to FBS that we haven’t thought of previously,” Cheng says.
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