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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

bioreactors

Jellatech Announces Successful Production of Animal-Identical Cell-Based Collagen

From connective tissue, skin health, lunchroom JELLO, and your inner ear to injections to create fuller lips, collagen is one of a body’s vital chameleons. Until now, the best way to introduce this protein to your everyday health is by eating animal products or substitutes such as Keratin and other amino acid supplements.

Raleigh-based Jellatech has announced the development of a full-length, triple-helical, and functional collagen made from their own proprietary cell lines. Others have worked on a solution to create lab-based collagen, but Jellatech’s stands alone as bio-identical to the animal-based variety.

In a recent interview with The Spoon, Stephanie Michelsen, Jellatech CEO, explained that, like others wanting to make an impact in the alt-protein space, she looked for a white space that was undeveloped and in need of a solution.

“I came across collagen and its roots and gelatin because it’s a unique protein only found in animals. And we use it for such, I mean, a crazy number of different applications,” Michelsen said. “So, I saw it’s going to be a future problem, so let’s try to solve it using cellular agriculture.”

Jellatech’s process differs from the fermentation approach to building alternative proteins. “It’s not fermentation because fermentation is more like yeast or bacteria using big vats,” Michelsen explained. “We use mammalian cells and those cells, so in that way, it’s different.”

Given its role in health and pharma, it’s no surprise the global collagen market size was valued at USD 8.36 billion in 2020, according to Grandview Research. It’s a space that is precited to grow at a 9.0% rate from 2020 to 2028, and much of that growth comes from increasing demand from the cosmetics markets. With that in mind, Michelsen sees pharma as low-hanging fruit and why taking the business-to-business approach is the best way to start.

Rob Schutte, Head of Science for Jellatch, emphasizes that what gives his company an advantage over possible competitors is the two years’ worth of work they put in to build a perfect collagen replica. “We’re thrilled to see that our cell-derived collagen appears bio-identical to collagen derived from animals. Because of this, we have a wide range of exciting applications from biomedicine to cosmetics to food and beverage.”

Jellatech will face the same issues as other companies creating either plant-based or cell-based proteins—cost. The number of bioreactors and the infrastructure to support a complex process can be enormous to build at scale. Without being specific, Michelsen believes that smart growth and innovation can play a crucial role in managing capital expenses.

We hope to do some innovation on our own to try to drive those costs down,” she said. “It’s true; there’s there are a lot of steps to get there. We are soon moving into the pilot and commercial-scale sometime after that. But, you know, I think there are a lot of avenues to explore to be able to cut those costs down.”

Unicorn Biotechnologies Is Making Purpose-Built Bioreactors for Cell-Based Meat Production

Jack Reid believes that the cell-based meat industry could move a lot faster if it just used manufacturing equipment made for the job.

According to the CEO of a new Cambridge-based startup called Unicorn Biotechnologies, companies trying to make meat without the animal today are mostly using large metal vats built for making something other than meat.

“Existing bioreactor systems haven’t been and weren’t developed specifically for the cell ag industry,” said Reid.

That’s right. In an industry where hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding has flowed into companies that are predicted to be someday worth billions of dollars, startups are using equipment ill-suited for the task at hand. Instead of using machines made to replicate animal cells at scale, these companies are using bioreactors optimized to create products already produced in large volumes and have established markets.

“We’re talking about large fermenting systems that are for brewing beer,” said Reid. “Or even pharmaceutical grade bioreactors that are designed for vaccine manufacturing and recombinant protein production.”

By using equipment that is not purpose-fit for replicating animal cells for cultured meat products, Reid thinks a massive amount of inefficiency and cost is added to the process. Pharma bioreactors don’t have the right sensors and are built to make a smaller amount of product at a much higher cost. Beer fermenters are built, well, to make beer. But the biggest problem in Reid’s mind is using systems that aren’t built for cell-based meat means you ultimately have unhappy cells.

“Most bioreactors have a long period optimization period where you have to figure out how to make the conditions just right to make the cells happy and to allow them to proliferate, differentiate and turn into the fat, muscle,” said Reid.

And making the cells happy is a challenge cell-based meat makers need to address at each phase of the process. This can mean optimizing the process on the research bench, during pilot production, and ultimately for fully scaled manufacturing.

If this sounds like a problem for an industry hoping to make enough product to account for a significant percentage of the overall meat market by the end of the decade, it is. But Reid and his co-founder Dr. Adam Glen think they have a solution: a modular manufacturing system built for cell-based meat production.

Why modular? Because as Reid describes it, with a modular bioreactor system, the transfer of the highly technical process for making a cell-based meat product would only need to happen once, from the lab bench to their bioreactor. After that, a company could scale up production by simply adding more modules.

“The path to scaling up your production capacity is going from one module to two, ten, one hundred, and so on until you reach your desired output.”

How would it all work? According to Reid, like a bunch of robots working together.

“A good parallel might be swarm robotics,” said Reid, who pointed to the example of robotic systems used in large grocery warehouses. “In those, we’re not looking at 100 different robots acting together. We’re looking at one system with 100 different ways to interact with the warehouse. That is the principle that underpins our technology and our modular system.”

By having a highly flexible system that can fit various sizes of producers, Reid thinks his systems could bring cell-based meat-making to a more widely distributed group of future meat manufacturers.

“We’d like it to be a reality where smaller manufacturing systems are a realistic possibility,” said Reid. “To bring to individual farms, to bring to communities, and really to spread the manufacturing of these products away from the highly centralized production model that has dominated protein manufacturing for the last few decades.”

But before all this happens, Reid and his team need to build the product and get it ready for manufacturing. The company, which took on a pre-seed funding round from SOSV/HAX and Entrepreneur First, is currently building its product prototype in the labs.

“Once we’ve hit a few more of our milestones, we’re looking to go out and do our next round of fundraising, scale up the team, and transform our prototype it into the first generation of our product.”

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.” 

Talking 23andMe For Farms, Bioreactors-as-a-Service & Other Crazy FoodTech Ideas With Dave Friedberg

But here’s the thing: most ideas about the future sound a little crazy the first time you hear them.

I had known about Friedberg for some time, in part because was the founder and CEO of agtech’s first unicorn in the Climate Corporation, a company that sold to Monsanto in 2013 for over $1 billion.

More recently I’d been tracking his progress at the Production Board, a company that is essentially an idea incubation factory for food, bio and ag tech concepts. The group is run by what Friedberg describes as “operators more than investors”.

The Production Board company portfolio is strung together by something closer to a grand unified theory about how the world should work rather than any sort of single investment theme. This theory, which Friedberg articulates in a manifesto on the Production Board website, reads as much like a science fiction short story as it does an investment guide and is centered around how the world’s existing food and agricultural production systems are antiquated relics of an inefficient industrial production processes that have taken root over the past couple centuries.

I sat down for a (virtual) meeting with Friedberg recently to talk about how the Production Board works and the progress he is making for upending some of the antiquated food and ag systems. We also talk about Friedberg thinks the future of food could look like ten years or more in the future.

You can see some excerpts from our interview below. In order to see the full interview and read a transcript of our conversation, you’ll want to subscribe to Spoon Plus.

Friedberg on how crazy it is we aren’t harnessing the full technology development to address our problems around food and agriculture:

If a Martian came down to planet Earth and they look at the way we’re doing things they would say, “that’s a little bit crazy. Not only that, but it’s crazy that you guys do things the way you do them given all the technology you have. You can do crazy shit as humans. You can like write DNA and you can like ferment things in these tanks and make whatever molecule you want. And you can pretty much print anything anywhere using different chemistry.” It’s ridiculous that the systems of production operate the way that they do.

Friedberg on the idea behind Culture Biosciences, a company he describes as an AWS for Bioreactors:

If you fast forward 50 years, Tyson Foods and these feedlots and cattle grazing, I mean, it’s so fu**ing inefficient it’s just unreal. It’s mind blowing how much energy and money and CO2 is part of the system of producing meat and animal protein. And we have the tools to make animal proteins and fermenters, so if you could have a fermenter in your home, and it just prints meat when you want it, I think that would be pretty cool. Technically the science is there, the engineering isn’t. And that’s the thing: with a lot of these things, the science is proven, but a lot engineering work still to do. But it’s, it’s feasible. All these things are feasible.

Friedberg on how the Production Board germinates ideas that ultimately become one of their portfolio businesses:

We do primary research, we spend a lot of time with scientists and researchers and identify new and emerging breakthroughs in science and technology. We also spend time in the markets we operate in: food, agriculture, human health, increasingly looking at things like energy materials. And then we try and identify what’s a better way of doing this thing in this market?

So using all these new breakthroughs using all this new science, using all this technology that might be emerging, how can we do something that can transform one of these markets and really do a 10x on it? If it’s not a 10x, if it’s just a 5% better model or a 10% better model, it’s not worth doing. If we can 10x the market – reduce cost or energy by 10 times – then it becomes kind of exciting. And so that’s how we kind of think about operating business opportunities.

The full interview and transcript are available for Spoon Plus customers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Startup That Makes Food Out Of Thin Air Working to Feed Future Colonies on Mars

There’s no doubt that our world’s food supply faces big challenges. With myriad problems ranging from soil erosion to climate change,  there is increasing stress on a global food system to figure out how to feed a rapidly growing world population. And those are just the challenges we face here on Earth. Even bigger difficulties await future space travelers trying to explore and inhabit far off places like Mars where there is currently no food system whatsoever. So with all these challenges – on earth and in space – wouldn’t it be great to invent some gizmo that makes food out of thin air? Well, the good news is that’s exactly what a startup from Finland is working to do. Last year, we wrote about how researchers from Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) had figured out how to create a single cell protein using only water, electricity, carbon dioxide and small organisms obtained from the environment. This year, the same group of researchers founded a company called Solar Foods, received €2 million in funding from Lifeline Ventures, and is now teaming up with the European Space Agency to create a bioreactor that can make food on Mars. The company has indicated it expects commercial protein production to start by 2021. From the release: “The conditions in Mars colonies are very different from those on Earth, but they have sunshine, and there are huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere,” says Kimmo Isbjörnssund, Manager, ESA Business Incubation Centre Finland. “The pioneering technology of Solar Foods enables a new way of producing food even in closed spaces. We assume that ingredients available at the Mars base can be used with the new technology.” While the idea of a food machine to feed future space civilizations is exciting, a bioreactor to feed people here on earth has much bigger potential implications in the near-term.  If the technology results in commercial or even consumer products that can produce food cheaply, bioreactors would be a completely new form of food production that doesn’t put stress on our existing systems.  The idea of low-cost bioreactors dispersed in food-stressed areas ten to fifteen years from now seems fairly reachable, particularly if the company expects to commercialize their research into working bioreactors in just a few years. Could a company like Solar Foods to create a bioreactor for home use? While the company hasn’t given any hints on future consumer products, history has shown us that everyday products developed for space travel often find their way into consumer homes. Products like Tang and freeze dried ice cream eventually made it to grocery store shelves, so why not expect to see a countertop version of a bioreactor next to our microwave someday? And who knows, maybe we’ll even include a home bioreactor in the Spoon’s holiday gift guide of 2030.

Designer Biohacking: At the Intersection of Building Food and Optimizing Health

What happens when a highly skilled designer focuses on food? In the case of Chloé Rutzerveld, who is based in the Netherlands, she set up a food concept and design business that focuses on everything from designer biohacking of food to 3D-printed food concepts. Her Edible Growth project focuses on combining aspects of design, science and technology to make our food more efficient, healthy and sustainable.

According to Munchies: “Using layers of edible plants, seeds, spores, and other microorganisms, Edible Growth creates intricate small meals that combine living mushrooms and greens with the mechanization of the most industrialized foods. In a nutshell, the Edible Growth products are composed of a nutritious base, or ‘edible matrix,’ of nuts, fruits, agar, and protein (which can even come from insects) that are extruded by a 3D printer. That matrix becomes the soil, more or less, for sprouting seeds, yeasts, beneficial bacteria, and mushroom spores to grow in over the course of five days. Finally, there’s a crust layer composed of carbohydrates and more protein, to hold everything else like a little superfood pastry.”

Here, you can see some of these concepts. The emerging field of food-focused “designer biohacking” also runs down to more basic, structural engineering of food and beverages, though. For example, The Odin is a company focused on “consumer genetic design” that sells kits for making green, fluorescent beer. The beer is based on a protein found in jellyfish that can be engineered into yeast. Customers execute this conversion themselves and the yeast can also be used to hack and morph champagne.

According to The Odin:

“Our goal with this kit is to begin to integrate synthetic biology and genetic design into people’s everyday life. We see a future in which people are genetically designing the plants they use in their garden, eating yogurt that contains a custom bacterial strain they modified or even someday brewing using an engineered yeast strain. Yeast is an integral part of our lives. It can used be used for brewing, baking, fermentation or as a research tool. Genetically Engineering yeast in your home seems like Science Fiction but is actually now reality. Using our kit you can make your yeast fluoresce and glow by inserting a gene from a jellyfish, the Green Flourescent Protein(GFP). This kit comes with everything you need to engineer a Mead Yeast we provide or your own favorite yeast that you provide.”

At the intersection of design and fanciful food concepts, 3D printing is also giving rise to many new culinary approaches. Take a look at the colorful, geometrically complex sugar-based shapes and concepts seen here, which make your local diner’s sugar cubes look downright unimaginative. Many such concepts have been shown at the 3D Food Printing Conference in Venlo, the Netherlands.  Chefs have created five-course 3D-printed meals, and scientists have created 3D-printed beef.

Meanwhile, home food reactors that make food using only electricity, carbon dioxide and organisms from the air we breathe are headed our way. Researchers from Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have successfully produced single cell protein in the lab using only water, electricity, carbon dioxide and small organisms obtained from the environment. The end result is a breakthrough that, if commercialized, could result in solar powered home food reactors that produce protein and carb-packed food. The process could also be leveraged to produce food for livestock, from, essentially, nothing.

The industrial design and 3D printing communities may also want to pay attention to personalized food fabrication. It is an emerging field that has great promise. Dr. Amy Logan, a team leader for dairy science at The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), has just launched a three-year study into the personalized fabrication of smart food systems. Logan’s research team will focus on instantly available diagnostics and how 3D printing or similar technologies can fabricate genetically targeted food to correct deficiencies. The diagnostics may leverage, of all things, human sweat.

Hacking the basic building blocks of food is inevitably going to intersect with hacking our bodies for more optimal health outcomes. “I think the future of food will go in multiple directions,” Chloe Rutzerveld has said. “It’ll all be very high tech and monitor the body.”