yes its hard, as somone who built a wetlab in a maker space for bio materials research and did the hours each day it took to push the bleeding edge on synthetic sea shell analogues to producing a working protocol. i haven't managed to publish the work in a journal due too the fees involved. you can find more on my site https://alexmakes.net/projects/sea_chells.html
for all mammalian eukaryotic cells ie cow , chicken ,human etc require growth media that contains FBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum this extracted from the foetus of cattle, otherwise the cells cannot survive outside of the a live mammal. it is not vegan or vegetarian in the slightest
Getting past the mental barrier that engineer's and biologist don't get along.
Manipulation of micro structures needed to develop meta materials are on sale that biological systems function at.
May have come from a classic engineering of wood and steel, but throw in a foam here and a self-assembling structure there and you can make things no amount of carbide inserts and glue would ever get you.
I've been actively working on this technology, goal is making it cheaper and simplify installation.
Stanford's a highly reflective surface ~95% combined with stacks layers of silica oxide on a wafer under vacume. The trick too achieving bellow ambient temperature is too reflect nearly all solar energy while emitting strongly in the "atmospheric window". Most silica compounds are well suited as emitters, however the hard part is adding a reflector too the silica and minimising heat transfer from the environment.
I've managed to make a meta material paint, reflector and emmiter that achieved bellow ambient temperature, with bulky conventional insulation. as for any effective cooling bellow ambient.