Analysts predict the value of the cultured meat market will reach $2.8 billion in 2030, which isn’t bad for a sector that has yet to produce a viable mass consumer product. While many global regulatory agencies decide if/when to give lab-grown beef, chicken, fish, etc., the green light, there is no shortage of companies working on supporting this nascent space.
Among the latest to see the merit in providing the underlying technology for the cultured meat space is Israel-based BioBetter, which has landed $10 million in A-round funding. This significant injection of capital will be instrumental in further building out its company, which uses tobacco leaves to develop growth factors (a material that stimulates cell production) to lower costs and increase lab-grown meats’ production.
BioBetter has developed a unique protein manufacturing platform for producing growth factors (GFs) using tobacco plants (Nicotiana tabacum) as natural, self-sustaining, animal-free bioreactors. The field-grown tobacco plants offer a new, sustainable, efficient, and flexible response to the market need for more competitively priced GFs, specifically insulin, transferrin, and FGF2. These compounds are necessary to make cultivated meat commercially viable.
“Tobacco plants actually have many advantages, including large biomass and fast-growing rate, their ability to yield multiple harvests year-round. Tobacco is not a food crop, and its foul-tasting alkaloids prevent it from being eaten by any animals, which makes it especially suitable for the production of growth factors,” Amit Yaari, PhD, CEO of BioBetter, told The Spoon via email. “No nutrients are extracted from the plants, but the tobacco plant cells are turned into small bioreactors, each manufacturing growth factor, according to the DNA sequence inserted into their genome.”
A bioreactor is defined as a vessel in which a chemical process is carried out which involves organisms or biochemically active substances derived from such organisms. For many plant-based foods and beverages, a bioreactor is a physical tank, such as that used by a brewery. Inside, genetically engineered microorganisms are cultivated with a substrate to create a mycoprotein burger, beer, or kombucha. Using a self-contained abundant available bioreactor lowers the cost of lab-grown meat. Every company in the world of lab-grown meat would agree that product pricing is a significant obstacle.
The $10 million round is led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), with additional investment from Milk and Honey Ventures, and the Israeli Innovation Authority (IIA). Erel Margalit, founder and executive chairman of JVP & Margalit Startup City, a Jerusalem-based innovation space, explains the economic advantage of using tobacco for growth factors. “Growth factors form the key building blocks for cell-cultured proteins. But costs currently run anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000 per gram of FGF2 (basic fibroblast growth factor). BioBetter’s technology can lower these costs to just $1 per gram.”
With its, investment BioBetter will expand to a larger pilot plant within the Tel Hai Industrial Park in the Upper Galilee Region of Israel. The new site will increase its tobacco plant-processing capacity, enabling it to meet its current global pool of commissions from cell-based meat cultivators. Shoseyov said that BioBetter is speaking to several companies in the cultured meat space but wouldn’t name any potential partners.
As for its immediate future, Yaari said, “We plan to scale up our production facility during 2023 and begin sales and supply of food-grade growth factors in Q1 2024. The tobacco plant suffers from a bad reputation, but we put it to good use.”
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