Cultured meat commercialization and regulatory roundup
Our roundup of the latest developments includes announcements from Mosa Meats, Meatable, Aleph Farms, Smart MCs, and UPSIDE, plus commercially-relevant research from Tufts, Kobe University, and Enzymit, FDA approval for consumption of gene-edited pigs, regulatory and governmental perspectives on cultured meat safety research priorities from Vireo and New Harvest, and new labelling requirements in Texas.
Mosa Meats opened a 2,760 square metre facility at their C.A.M.P.U.S. (Center for Advanced Meat Production, Upscaling, and Sustainability) in Maastricht. Cells will be cultured in alginate-based gels without animal-based serum or genetic modification. They anticipate their first hamburgers to be served in Singapore within a year.
Meatable held their first tasting in Singapore after receiving the Singapore Food Agency’s (SFA) approval. They featured cultured pork sausages and also aim to launch a product in 2024.
The FDA had no questions regarding GOOD Meat’s conclusion that foods comprised of or containing cultured chicken cell material are as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods. This is the second FDA “no questions” letter for cultivated meat, following the one sent to Upside Foods in November 2022.
Aleph Farms announced a long-term agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific to establish a supply chain for growth media, including sugars, fats, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and growth factors. Thermo Fisher Scientific will ensure compliance with requirements set by regulatory agencies and scale-up production to match Aleph Farm’s needs.
Sydney-based biotechnology company, Smart MCs, has been awarded AUD$600K by the Australian Government to scale up production of their edible microcarriers for cultured meat.
UPSIDE has developed a new chicken cell line that eliminates the need for platelet-derived growth factors - one of the most expensive components of cell culture media.
Scientists at Tufts published a new method for generating immortalized bovine muscle stem cells. They engineered constitutive expression of the ribonucleoprotein polymerase telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT), which maintains telomere ends, and of cyclin-dependent kinase 4 (CDK4), a modulator in cell division, “turbocharging” the cells to divide and grow faster. The cells had achieved over 120 doublings at the time of publication.
Researchers from Kobe University introduced genes involved in L-lactate utilization into Synechococcus, a ubiquitous marine cyanobacterium. This may provide a novel approach for removing a troublesome waste compound that builds up in culture medium, causing cytotoxic effects.
Enzymit leveraged AI and deep learning to create new enzymes that produce new insulin proteins with the same function and greater activity than those found in animals. Non-animal-derived processing aids can contribute to cheaper and more sustainable growth medium.
A Washington State University sausage made history. The US FDA authorized the university to use its gene-edited pigs for human consumption — in this case, as German-style sausages.
The US State of Texas passed an alternative protein labelling bill which will require meat alternatives to be labelled with qualifying terms such as “analogue, meatless, plant-based, made from plants” or “cell-cultured”, “lab-grown”.
Vireo and New Harvest published regulatory and governmental perspectives on cultured meat safety research priorities - the pre-print catalogues key findings from an extensive series of interviews and workshops held in 2022 with regulatory and governmental scientists worldwide.
Researchers from UC Davis received press attention after releasing a preprint that claimed the environmental impact of cultured meat production could be orders of magnitude higher than conventional production. The study did not consider the effects of process optimization as production is scaled up, but it does provide a thorough analysis of the GHG emissions produced in different cultured meat production scenarios.