Vireo Advisors and New Harvest are excited to announce that we have published the outcomes of Phase II of the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI). The new paper, published in Foods, catalogues key findings from an extensive series of interviews and workshops held with regulatory and governmental scientists worldwide. 

Participants believed that cultured meat and seafood products might be similar to conventional products from a microbiological and toxicological standpoint. However, they did identify important data gaps, potential safety questions and a need for further research. The paper collates their input and summarizes the current situation based on published literature, current food regulations, and established best practices in the three topic areas that were of greatest concern:

• The need for research to identify and define the hazards in these novel processes so that appropriate controls can be established to prevent or mitigate these hazards and suitable testing is performed.

• The need for new safety testing methods, particularly in the areas of comparative assessment (such as proteomics and metabolomics), input risk assessment, and microbiological assessment.

• The value of publicly available safety data to the public, industry, and researchers.

This is the second part of the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI), addressing the critical technical, methodological, and safety issues related to evaluating the safety of cultured meat and seafood from the perspective of diverse stakeholders, including industry, governmental scientists and regulators, academic researchers, and consumers.

The gaps and research priorities identified by regulatory and governmental scientists in this study, in conjunction with priorities identified by the industry in Phase 1, will inform the next steps of the CMSI. The goal is to build open access resources toward regulatory and market acceptance by convening and coordinating a multi-stakeholder consortium to develop knowledge, shared practices and databases to accelerate the commercial adoption of cultured meat and seafood products.