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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Biomanufacturing

TurtleTree Scientific and Dyadic to Develop Affordable Growth Factors for Cell-Based Proteins at Scale

TurtleTree Scientific, the recently launched B2B unit of TurtleTree Labs that develops growth factors for cellular ag, today announced a “fully funded” collaboration with biotech company Dyadic International. Through this partnership, the two will develop recombinant food-grade growth factors for proteins that can be grown in high yields at lower costs in bioreactors. This could allow TurtleTree, which makes cell-cultured products (including human breastmilk) to scale up and get to market faster, paving the way for cultured meat and dairy companies to do the same.

Dyadic is known for its its C1 gene expression based on the Thermothelomyces heterothallica fungus. Via this platform, Dyadic can produce recombinant proteins at an industrial scale of up to 500,000 liters, with lower capital and operating expenditures than what cultured meat companies would normally find. The company’s tech has been used by some of the world’s most well-known biotech companies, including DuPont and BASF.

In a statement, TurtleTree cofounder and Chief Strategist Max Rye said that manufacturing human growth factors both at scale and at an affordable cost has been a major challenge, and that the partnership with Dyadic will help the company “overcome this hurdle” safely and efficiently.

Growth factors account for the bulk of the cost in cell-based protein production — 55 to 95 percent, by some accounts. Part of the reason for this, TurtleTree explained last month, is that cell culture media components have been developed for non-food areas like research and theraputics, which do not have the same scale requirements and cost constraints as food and agriculture production.

Ronen Tchelet, PhD, Dyadic’s Vice President of Research and Business Development, said in today’s press release that the company will engineer “hyper-productive” C1 cel lines to develop high bioactivity and yields suitable for commercial-scale productions. This will not only accelerate the timeline for TurtleTree’s business, it could also, according to Rye, “make cellular agriculture a reality for all” by enabling food-grade growth factors at an affordable price point to the wider cellular ag industry.

Culture Biosciences Announces High-Throughput Mammalian Cell Culture Capability for Cloud-Based Bioreactors

One of the big challenges in developing cell-cultured meat products is the sheer amount of lab time needed to develop and optimize the manufacturing process so cells can be produced at scale.

This optimization process can involve working to develop the right growth media, finding the optimal growth conditions for the cells, or evaluating ways to genetically modify cell lines for better reproduction.

Traditionally much of this cell culture process development takes place in-house using a benchtop stirred tank bioreactor. But a startup called Culture Biosciences wants to take this process off the hands of cell-meat makers and allow them to utilize Culture Biosciences’ cloud-based bioreactor systems.

To demonstrate its capabilities, Culture Biosciences recently announced its high-throughput mammalian cell-culture capabilities have been proven out using CHO (Chinese Hamster Ovar) cell cultures.

The news, announced via a white paper written by the company’s senior bioprocess engineer Michael McSunas, shows the results of the work they had done using CHO cells in the company’s 250 ML cloud bioreactor. According to the white paper, Culture Biosciences was able to grow the cell lines from a customer and show reproduceability alongside internally developed cultures, as well as the ability to scale-down results from a customers 1 L glass bioreactors.

In short, Culture showed that results produced on-site are consistent, can be reproduced and scaled using their connected bioreactor technology, all important proof points for the company’s “bioreactor-as-a-service” model for cell-based meat development.

In such a model, the customer sends in vials with cells and growth media and allows Culture to thaw them and perform the studies in their 250 ML connected bioreactors. The data is then uploaded to the cloud for the customer to analyze.

If this idea of moving away from a completely “roll-your-own” infrastructure model and pushing some of development process to a service-based cloud model sounds like a concept from the Internet technology world, you’re right. That’s because Culture Biosciences CEO Will Patrick, who previously worked at Google, wondered why the world of biosciences didn’t have the same type of toolsets and accessible infrastructure such as the cloud industry with AWS or semiconductor industry with manufacturing fabs like those from TSMC.

Patrick eventually decided to build some of these tools himself in the form of his cloud-based bioreactor, and now he hopes they can act as a platform for mammalian cell development.

“Culture can help optimize the manufacturing process,” Patrick told via email. “This is important because optimizing the manufacturing process such that production is cheaper is one of the biggest R&D challenges that face cell-based meat companies.” 

Next Up for Cellular Agriculture: Scalability, Accessibility

At one point in the not-too-distant past, the idea of edible protein grown in a lab was the stuff of science fiction. But in what’s felt like a relatively short period of time (a few years), a greater number of companies, individuals, and investors have embraced the concept of cellular agriculture and, more and more, consider it a vital part of our future food system. 

Now the cell-based protein sector has a new set of challenges to tackle. As HigherSteaks’ Benjamina Bollag and BIOMILQ’s Michelle Egger discussed this week during The Spoon’s Food Tech Live event, we’re past the days of trying to convince folks that cellular agriculture is a viable reality. Now, companies have to prove the idea of growing protein in a lab can work at scale outside that lab to feed a growing world population, and do so while keeping environmental degradation minimal.

It’s not exactly a simple feat (understatement), and it certainly won’t happen next week (or next year). But during this week’s Food Tech Live, Bollag and Egger pinpointed not just the areas cellular agriculture needs to focus on in order to continue its evolution towards the mainstream, but also ideas for how to get there.

Among those are safety and quality assurance, equipment design, supply chain logistics, and cell culture density, to name just a few things. Egger added that one of the challenges cellular agriculture companies face right now is they are relying on technology from industries (biotech, Pharma) that have never had to scale to the level of mass commodity, which essentially the holy grail for cell ag companies.

Perhaps the biggest — and most important — challenge for these companies will be making cell-cultured protein, whether meat, breast milk, cheese, or eggs, into the hands of many. In other words, how do we make it more accessible to everyone?

It’s a question that isn’t possible to answer in the span of a 30-minute online chat, but definitely one the industry as a whole should consider now, though we’re years away from reaching that stage of mass commodity. Right now, a select few consumers can get their hands on alternative proteins grown in a lab. Those are usually the folks invited to exclusive taste-testings or the ones that can afford the rare fine dining experience for cultured protein.

“We can’t lose sight of the fact that if you truly want to reduce the amount of environmental degradation or provide more options to people or subsidize diets in a healthier manner, you have to get into the hands of everyone throughout this world,” said Egger.

That in turn will require more strategic thinking on the part of the industry in terms of how to reach a wider audience. It will also require collaboration amongst the difference companies currently innovating across the cellular agriculture sector.

Vow Foods, Maker of Cell-Based Kangaroo and Other Meats, Raises $6M

Sydney, Australia-based company Vow Foods announced today that it has raised $6 million in seed funding to further develop alternative forms of meat — chicken, pork, and kangaroo among them. The round was led by Square Peg Capital, with participation from Tenacious Ventures and existing investors Blackbird Ventures and Grok Ventures, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

Investment in the cell-based meat sector has steadily increased over the last several months, though most of that funding has gone towards companies producing alt forms of the most common meats, including chicken, pork, beef, and bacon. 

Like other cell-based meat companies, Vow uses animal cells, rather than actual animals, to produce alternative meat products. In cultivators, it nourishes the animal cells, which then form fat, tissue, and muscle just as they would if they were growing inside the animal itself. 

Unlike others in the space, Vow hasn’t limited itself to just the basics when it comes to meat types. As of this writing, the company has a cell library of 11 different animals that includes more exotic fare such as alpaca, water buffalo, and the aforementioned kangaroo. 

The company did a taste testing of its kangaroo dumpling in 2019. More recently, it held a “culinary demonstration” event that showed off six of its cell-based meat products. The company will also soon open a “food design studio” and laboratory in Sydney to further develop its products. 

And while eating a lab-grown kangaroo might still seem like the stuff of fantasy for many, cell-based meat as a legitimate player in the food industry is very much a reality now. As mentioned above, investment dollars for cell-based meat increased in 2020, and new companies and approaches emerged steadily throughout the year. To cap it all off, cell-based meat got its first-ever regulatory stamp of approval in Singapore, thereby opening the gates of opportunity for others.

Parts of the world — the U.S. being one of them — will probably never see cell-based kangaroo on grocery store shelves. However, Vow’s fundraise this week highlights not just further growth for the cell-based meat sector, but also an interest in the kind of variety and versatility the whole industry needs to continue its march into the mainstream food system.

Aleph Farms’ Cultured Meat Coming to Japan Courtesy of Mitsubishi

Israel-based Aleph Farms announced today that its cultured meat is headed for the Japanese market, thanks to a new Memorandum of Understanding with Mitsubishi.

Through the new deal, Aleph Farms will provide its BioFarm platform to cultivate whole-muscle steaks, while Mitsubishi provides its expertise in biotechnology processes, branded food manufacturing and distribution throughout Japan.

In addition opening up a new market for Aleph Farms, today’s announcement is a nice bit of validation for the company’s BioFarm technology. Announced last November, Aleph says its BioFarm facility will allow it to scale the production of cull cultured cow meat affordably, bringing the price down to parity with factory farmed meat.

But Aleph will face some cell-cultured competition in Japan. Japanese company, Integriculture has its own lab meat technology and was awarded a grant by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry last year to build out a commercial cell ag facility.

While we’re only in January, the building blocks were put in place last year to make 2021 a breakout year for the technology. Last month, Eat Just made history by making the world’s first sale of cultured meat in Singapore. In Israel, Supermeat opened a test kitchen that offers cell-cultured chicken dishes in exchange for feedback from diners.

Aleph Farms even generated a bit of high-profile news itself last month when Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, did a public tasting of the company’s steak.

Despite all the forward momentum, there are still a number of regulatory issues that need to be designed and implemented for this new technology. With cell cultured meat technology becoming more of a reality, expect a steady stream of announcements in the space throughout the year.

Brightseed’s First Major Phytonutrient Discovery Finds Black Pepper May Help with Fatty Liver

Brightseed, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover previously hidden phytonutrients in plants, today announced preclinical data from its first major discovery targeting liver and metabolic health.

The discovery was made with Forager, Brightseed’s AI platform that looks at plants on a molecular level to identify novel phytonutrient compounds (for example, antioxidants in blueberries). Once found, Forager then catalogs these compounds and uses that information to predict the health benefits of those compounds.

With today’s announcement, Brightseed’s Forager has identified phytonutrients that can help with fat accumulation in the pancreas and liver, a condition linked to obesity. Brightseed explained its findings in a press release, writing:

Using a computational approach with data from Brightseed’s plant compound library, Forager identified two natural compounds with promising bioactive function, N-trans caffeoyltyramine (NTC) and N-trans-feruloyltyramine (NTF). Researchers determined that these compounds acted through a novel biological mechanism governing the accumulation and clearance of liver fat. The preclinical data was presented in the fall of 2020 as a poster session at The Liver Meeting® Digital Experience hosted by American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, and published as abstract #1679 in Hepatology: Vol 72, No S1. 

The release continued:

IIn preclinical studies, NTC and NTF acted as potent HNF4a activators, promoting fat clearance from the steatotic livers of mice fed a high fat diet, by inducing lipophagy.  HNF4a is a central metabolic regulator that is impaired by elevated levels of fat in the bloodstream resulting from chronic overeating. Administered in proper doses, NTC and NTF restored proper function of this central metabolic regulator, including maintaining healthy lipid and sugar levels in the bloodstream to normalize organ function. Their activities were confirmed using a cell-based human insulin promoter activation assay. Forager found NTC and NTF in over 80 common edible plant sources. 

One of those plant sources, Brightseed Co-Founder and CEO, Jim Flatt told me by phone this week, is black pepper. Now, before you run out and grab your pepper grinder, there is still a lot of work that remains before the results of this discovery bear out.

First, the compounds still need to go through clinical trials to validate Brightseed’s initial findings. This includes not only confirming any health benefits, but also determining the doses and best methods for administering the compounds. Then the best plant source for those compounds needs to be determined as well as the best method for compound extraction. Flatt told me that if all goes well, you can expect to see some form of supplement on the market by the end of 2022.

Even though that is a ways off, part of the reason to be excited by today’s announcement is because of how little time it took Brightseed to make this particular discovery. Through its computational processes, Flatt told me his company was able to shrink what used to take years down to months. “Fifteen to 20 percent of time that is computational saves us 80 percent of the time in the lab,” Flatt said.

Brightseed has already analyzed roughly 700,000 compounds in the plant world for health properties and says it’s on track to surpass 10 million by 2025. Doing so could help unlock a number of previously unknown treatments for a number of ailments and conditions as well as general improvement to our metabolic and immuno health.

In addition to independent research such as today’s findings, Brightseed also partners with major CPG brands to help them identify new applications for their products. For instance, Danone is using Brightseed’s technology to help find new health benefits of soy.

Brightseed’s announcement today also reinforces the bigger role AI will play in our food system. AI and machine learning is being used to do everything from turning data into cheese, to solving complex issues around protein folding.

As more discoveries using AI are made, more investment will be poured into the space, which will accelerate even more discoveries.

Talking The Future of Biomanufacturing With Culture Biosciences’ Will Patrick

Will Patrick has spent much of his career thinking about how to build things. During his stints at places like Google[x] where he worked on projects such Project Wing, Google’s drone delivery service, he’d gained an appreciation for the toolsets that helped innovators in the world of hardware and software rapidly innovate and accelerate their products into the market.

Over time, Patrick eventually became interested in the world of biomanufacturing. As his interest in biotech grew, one of the things he realized was that many tools he’d grown accustomed to in the world of mechanical and software engineering to help makers rapidly iterate were not there in the world of synthetic biology.

And so he decided to build them. Out of this Culture Biosciences was born, which offers a digital biomanfacturing platform in the form of cloud bioreactors as a service. Before long, some of the industry’s more interesting future food startups as well as CPGs and big pharma companies were running experiments in Culture’s bioreactors and monitoring them on the company’s data dashboards.

I talked to Patrick about this journey and where he sees Culture going in the future. To learn more about Patrick and his vision for the future of Culture, just click play below or head over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Michelin Star Japanese Chef Launches Startup to Create Cultured Meat

While high-end cuisine is a logical launch point for cultured meat, few expect chefs themselves to start companies that create this form of alternative protein.

But if you’re Chef Shimamura Masaharu of Japan, someone who writes that in high school he wondered whether to “to wear a cook’s lab coat or a scientist’s lab coat,” straddling the two worlds makes perfect sense.

Which is why the chef/owner of Michelin-starred restaurant Unkaku has launched DiverseFarm, a joint venture with cell-ag technology company TissueByNet.

TissueByNet has developed a proprietary technology to make cultured cellular tissue to create lab-grown organs in hospitals, which DiverseFarm hopes to now use to make cultured meat.

TissueByNet’s technology uses what is called spheroids, which are three dimensional spherical globs of cells that get fed into what the company calls Net Molds. Net Molds are containers that allow the tissue to grow without a more traditional scaffolding structure based on biomaterials. The cell culture is placed into the Net Mold with the spheroids culture, where they fuse together and are ready to “harvest” in one to three weeks.

On its website, DiverseFarm shows some examples of what the cell-cultured meat menu selections might look like, listing a variety of mainly cultured duck meat including “Deep-fried Domyoji of cultured duck meat, seasonal bean paste” and “Dashi chazuke of cultured duck meat.”

The news is another illustration of the growing interest in cultured meat in Japan. While Singapore’s been getting lots of attention due to the government’s active catalyzation efforts and milestones like Eat Just’s, startups like Integriculture and Shojinmeat (the news of DiverseFarm was first highlighted via a tweet from Shojinmeat) have captured the imagination of those in this island nation who are interested in increasing food sovereignty.

Eat Just Gets the World’s First Regulatory Approval to Sell Cultured Meat

In a first for cultured meat, Eat Just has received regulatory approval to sell its cell-based chicken product. The company, best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, announced last night that its cultured chicken product has been approved for sale in Singapore as an ingredient in chicken bites. Other cultured chicken products are planned for the future.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, this approval deems Eat Just’s cell-based chicken as “safe for human consumption.” To achieve this, and to the demonstrate safety and quality of its end product, the company spent months documenting its proprietary process for making cell-based chicken. An analysis included information on the identity and purity of the chicken cells, the full manufacturing process, as well as the nutritional components of the end product. 

Eat Just worked with the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), Singapore’s regulatory authority for food safety. The company said it has also struck deals with “well-established local manufacturers” to finish the product before it goes out to restaurants.

Heading into restaurants first is in keeping with Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick’s timeline for cell-based meat, which he outlined for us at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Cell-based meat companies don’t simply jump from a successful prototype in the lab to mass commercialization. Rather, there are a number of stops along the way, the first of which is to get the prototype out of the lab and into a place like a restaurant. However, the journey for cell-based meats as they evolve from prototype stage will be lengthy: Tetrick put the timeline “somewhere north of 15 years” for when the buying public will find cell-based meats as ubiquitous as, say Coca-Cola products.

Getting regulatory approval is paramount to commercializing cell-based meat, so today’s news marks a significant milestone not only for Eat Just but for the entire cell-based meat sector, which has seen an astounding amount of investment over the last several months. 

Commenting on Eat Just’s milestone, Good Food Institute Executive Director Bruce Friedrich said, “Cultivated meat will mark an enormous advance in our efforts to create a food supply that is safe, secure, and sustainable, and Singapore is leading the way on this transition.”

The regulatory approval will allow Eat Just to launch its forthcoming GOOD Meat brand in Singapore, the details of which are forthcoming at a later date.

Human Steak: the Next Lab-Grown Meat?

The range of alternative meats grown in a lab widens every month, and now we have companies attempting lab-grown beef, chicken, seafood, brisket, and even kangaroo. Could human meat be next?

I doubt it, but a group of designers recently highlighted how possible that concept would be should someone attempt to try it. Andrew Pelling, Orkan Telhan and Grace Knight made a DIY meal kit for lab-grown human meat that was recently nominated for Design of the Year by The Design Museum in London.

Called the Ouroboros Steak (named after the ancient symbol of the snake eating its own tail), the design is for a meal kit that would come with everything a person needs to culture cells from their own body and turn them into mini steaks. The design was commissioned for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Designs for Different Futures exhibition, which ended in March of this year. 

To be clear: no one is growing human meat to sell in the grocery stores. The design is purely conceptual. According to Design Museum, it is “a critical commentary on the lab-grown meat industry and critiques the industry’s claims to sustainability.”

That critique is right on the mark, since lab-grown meat producers generally rely on the controversial Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) to produce their alt-meat wares. FBS is a byproduct that comes from the blood of cow fetuses. As this article from Slate from a few years back highlights, it’s a gruesome practice that involves killing a pregnant cow, removing the live fetus, then draining the latter of blood that eventually gets refined and turned into FBS. 

The website for the Ouroboros Steak concept doesn’t specifically mention FBS, but notes, almost wryly, that, “Growing yourself ensures that you and your loved ones always know the origin of your food, how it has been raised and that its cells were acquired ethically and consensually.”

To be fair, a number of lab-grown meat companies acknowledge the ethics around FBS, and some are taking steps to find a different media for their products. When I spoke with BioBQ last month, CEO Katie Kam emphasized that her company does not use FBS and is instead looking for an alternative media for its lab-grown brisket. In Canada, a company called Future Fields is in the midst of developing what it calls “animal-free media,” which is just as it sounds.

Still, the FBS is the go-to media when it comes to cell-based meat, and calling out the ethics of it was a major goal of the Ouroboros Steak design: “As the lab-grown meat industry is developing rapidly, it is important to develop designs that expose some of its underlying constraints in order to see beyond the hype,” Pelling told Dezeen magazine.

He added that, “We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs. We rather ask a question: what would be the sacrifices we need to make to be able to keep consuming meat at the pace that we are?”

Lab-grown meat is in the midst of an investment frenzy, not to mention the subject of much hype and news coverage. But it won’t be landing on grocery store shelves any time soon, in part because, in addition to being controversial, FBS is extremely expensive. A number of regulatory issues and questions around scalability also need to be resolved before we’re eating a cell-based Big Mac or nabbing a couple fillets for the backyard BBQ. Opinions differ around lab-grown meat’s timeline to the mainstream, with some claiming it will take just a couple years and others putting that mark “somewhere north of 15.” Some say it will never happen.

Wherever the reality falls, lab-grown meat producers will have to address the controversies surrounding their process process. That could mean explaining to consumers the gory details of FBS or, better yet, finding an alternative. Human meat won’t ever be that alternative, but the Ouroboros Steak project rightly reminds us we need to think twice about the ethics of innovation before barelling headlong into the hype.

Change Foods Raises $875,000 for Its Precision Fermentation Cheese

Alternative protein company Change Foods has raised $875,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round of funding, surpassing its initial target of $600,000. Green Queen Media was first to break the news. Participating in the round were Twitter’s Asia-Pacific VP Maya Hari, abillionveg founder Vikas Garg, game developer Tom Crago, and existing investors Newstead and Klar. 

Change Foods plans to use the funds to scale up its precision fermentation technology, which the company is using to develop an initial prototype of an animal-free cheese it says will look, taste, and cook like dairy-based cheese.

Most alt-cheese products currently available still fall well below the bar in terms of replicating the real thing in terms of taste, texture, and functionality. That’s largely because those products don’t contain the casein compound, which is found in cow’s milk and is an essential ingredient of cheese. To get that compound and others, Change Foods genetically modifies microorganisms and ferments them with sugar in a process known as precision fermentation. 

Speaking to Green Queen, Change Foods founder David Bucca said better precision fermentation technology could lead to a less vulnerable dairy supply chain, since products can be made locally, have a longer shelf life, and don’t require cold chain infrastructure to transport. 

Fermentation has been called “the next pillar” of alternative protein alongside plant-based and cell-based proteins. Precision fermentation is one method within that larger fermentation category, and is also used by companies like Perfect Day and Impossible Foods. 

To start, Change Foods is developing mozzarella and cheddar cheeses, though it plans to branch out into other dairy products in the future. The plan is to sell products via B2C channels by 2023. 

In the meantime, Change Foods will also use some of the pre-seed funding to expand its core team. It also has ambitions to raise a $4 million seed round in 2021.

Shiok Meats Unveils Prototype for Cell-Based Lobster

At a recent exclusive tasting event, Singapore-based Shiok Meats unveiled a prototype for cell-based lobster, according to FoodNavigator-Asia, who attended the event. The prototype was unveiled at the event as part of two dishes, a lobster gazpacho and lobster terrine.

Shiok said the lobster is cultivated with the same technology the company uses it make its cell-based shrimp. Shiok takes a sample of lobster cells, which are then grown in a bioreactor and harvested several weeks later. Right now, it takes between four and six weeks for Shiok to produce its cell-based shrimp; the company says the lobster takes a couple weeks longer than that. It is also more expensive to produce, though the company is looking to bring the cost down to $50/kg at some point in the future.

Neither the shrimp nor the lobster are available for sale to consumers right now. The company plans to have its Shiok Shrimp product commercially available by 2022. A manufacturing plant in Singapore is slated to be operational at that time, too. Shiok raised a $12.6 million Series A round in September of this year, part of which will go towards building out the production facility. FoodNavigator reported that once that plant is up and running, Shiok will be able to get regulatory approval to sell its products, which it will initially do in restaurants and other B2B settings.

No cell-based meat or seafood is currently available for commercial sale, though plenty of companies are moving towards that future. The list includes BlueNalu, a company that also makes cell-based seafoods and is currently expanding its production facility, which the company plans to open in the next five years. And plenty of investment is currently happening in the cell-based meat sector, with Mosa Meat, Integriculture, Meat-Tech 3D, and others all raising funding in the last six months.

However, being able to sell these products to mainstream consumers and at scale will be a much longer process, one that could take up to 15 years, by some accounts. Costs must first come down, and companies must get regulatory approval before they can even sell their products to restaurants.

For its part, Shiok will keep innovating on various cell-based seafoods in the meantime. In addition to shrimp and lobster, the company plans to introduce a cell-based carp prototype in a few months.