This week, a group of Japanese academic and corporate partners announced the creation of the Consortium for Future Innovation by Cultured Meat, a new group that aims to promote “concrete efforts for social implementation of edible cultured meat manufacturing technology using 3D bioprinting.”
The group, which includes the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Shimadzu Corporation, Itoham Yonekyu Holdings Inc., Toppan Printing Co., Ltd, Inc., and SIGMAXYZ Inc., stated it will focus on the development and application of 3D bioprinting technology, the establishment of a consistent value chain from production to distribution, and the contribution to the establishment of laws and regulations through cooperation with government agencies and private companies.
In August 2021, Osaka University and Toppan Printing published a paper outlining the technology for 3D printing fibrous tissues, such as muscle, fat, and blood vessels. The group’s efforts will be centered around Osaka University’s 3D bioprinting technology, which allows the creation of muscle tissue structures at will, and can be applied to the fields of food as well as regenerative medicine and drug discovery.
Alongside the establishment of this consortium, Osaka University, Itoham Yonekyu, and Toppan Printing have opened a joint research course for “social implementation” of cultured meat on the Suita campus of Osaka University. This joint research course and the Osaka University-Shimadzu Analytical Innovation Collaborative Research Laboratory established in December 2019, will serve as the research promotion base for the consortium.
According to the announcement, the group has designated different roles for the member companies. From the announcement: Organizations participating in the consortium are “management partners” who engage in technological development, cooperation with government agencies and related organizations, and disseminate information to the outside world, “R&D partners” who engage in joint research in specific technical areas, and dissemination of cultivated meat-related technologies and products. It consists of “social implementation partners” who are responsible for disseminating information to Osaka University, Shimadzu, Itoham Yonekyu, Toppan Printing, and Sigmaxis will act as “operating partners”.
The group has plans to showcase the technology in action at the ‘Osaka Healthcare Pavilion Nest for Reborn’ at the Osaka Kansai Expo, where it will exhibit automated cultured meat production equipment. Through this exhibition, the consortium plans to present cultured meat as one of the “foods of the future” which it says has the potential to reduce the environmental burden and help solve the global protein shortage, leading to the promotion of consumer understanding.
The new consortium isn’t the first organization in Japan for cultivated meat. In 2021, a group led by Integriculture announced the CulNet Consortium, a group intended to be an open innovation platform for the development of cell-cultured meat in Japan and beyond. In January of this year, Integriculture debuted cultivated foie gras from duck liver-derived cells, which it developed using the CulNet Consortium framework.
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