Like many of the technologies that are driving innovation in the alternative protein space, plant molecular farming has traditionally been used in the pharmaceutical industry. The practice — which involves genetically editing a crop so that its cells produce a desired protein — is being discussed as a way to rapidly produce proteins for COVID-19 vaccines.
In the food industry, molecular farming is one route to producing the animal proteins that give egg, dairy, and meat products their visual, taste, and functional properties. Molecular farming allows you to use the exact same protein that would normally be produced by a chicken or cow, without the need for any actual animals.
Moolec Science, a spinoff of Argentina-based agtech company Bioceres Crop Solutions, is probably the most prominent name in molecular farming for the food industry. Moolec already sells chymosin, a cheesemaking enzyme, which the company grows in safflower plants. They’ve also successfully grown meat proteins in soybean and pea plants.
The Moolec team believes that molecular farming can help to bring down the end costs of alternative meat products. (“There’s nothing better than low-tech farming to produce at an enhanced scale and low cost,” company CEO and co-founder Gastón Paladini told The Spoon back in October.) And they may be right.
Molecular farming can help producers to avoid some of the costly and tricky problems of growing proteins in traditional bioreactors. When you use a plant as your bioreactor, as food scientist and thought leader Tony Hunter pointed out in an article this year, you don’t need to worry about maintaining sterile conditions: Plants have built-in immune systems.
Moolec plans to launch its first animal-free meat protein in late 2022 or early 2023. The company is currently working toward regulatory approval for its products — and its progress will be an interesting test of regulatory tolerance of Moolec’s brand of genetic engineering.
One potential concern for regulators as they scrutinize molecular farming processes will be the possibility of gene flow from modified crops to related plants. Tiamat Sciences, a Belgium-based molecular farming startup, is limiting that possibility by growing its crops in a contained vertical farming system.
Tiamat has plans to expand alongside the cell-based meat industry. “By targeting nascent markets on the verge of scale-up, we’ve already demonstrated significant traction for our solutions and an early revenue potential that is outstanding for a biotech startup,” said Tiamat’s founder and CEO France-Emmanuelle Adil in a recent press release. The company currently produces GRAS-certified, animal-free growth factors for cultivated meat, and also manufactures proteins for the pharmaceutical industry.
Last month, Tiamat announced that it had raised a $3 million seed funding round led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm True Ventures. The company is using those funds to construct a pilot facility in Durham, N.C. — so we may see them boost their capacity in the year to come.
Molecular farming startups still have some issues to work out. As Tony Hunter noted in his piece on molecular farming, plant tissue has larger and fewer protein-producing cells compared to the same volume of mammal tissue, making plants less productive as protein factories. And there are costs associated with extracting protein molecules from plants at the cellular level.
Still, the same upsides of molecular farming that make it attractive to the pharmaceutical industry will likely continue to spark interest from alternative protein producers — especially as those producers seek ways to bring down the retail prices of their products.
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