Today the USDA and Tufts University announced a $10 million award to be distributed over a 5 year period to develop an Institute for Cellular Agriculture, a flagship American cultivated protein research center of excellence. The award is part of a $146 million investment announced by the USDA on October 6th by its National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Sustainable Agricultural Systems program.
The new Institute will be run by David Kaplan, who currently heads the Cellular Agriculture program at Tufts University.
From the release:
Tufts University Professor David Kaplan, a renowned cultivated meat expert, will lead the initiative and will be joined by investigators from Virginia Tech, Virginia State, University of California-Davis, MIT, and University of Massachusetts-Boston. The new institute will “develop outreach, extension, and education for the next generation of professionals” in cellular agriculture and lead research that will help to expand the menu of climate-friendly protein options and improve food system resilience.
The new program is the first federally funded Institute at a major university with the explicit goal of developing new approaches and technologies for cultivated meat. The project includes the development of new sustainable and cruelty-free growth medium, scaffolding, and fermentation technologies that can contribute to the advancement of the cultivated meat field.
The program also aims to develop a curriculum to educate students to be future leaders in the cultivated meat space. One of the goals of the Institute will be to develop “outreach, extension, and education for the next generation of professionals for workforce development and as technology leaders.”
It’s encouraging to see the Biden administration investing in research centers of excellence for cellular agriculture, particularly cultivated meat. The US has fallen woefully behind other countries in its support for developing next-generation food technology, which is why I suggested early this year that the Biden administration create a US taxpayer-funded food innovation hub. This, in essence, does that for cultivated meat.
It’s also a sign that the US education system is racing to develop a curriculum for a field that – at least up to this point – has lacked the kind of well-established curriculum as other strategically essential fields such as computer science or biotechnology. That’s a shame because while the cultivated meat industry leverages many of the advances in other areas like biotech and CS, it’s a unique field unto itself which requires an educated and qualified workforce to power if it is to reach its full potential.
Hopefully, the new National Institute for Cellular Agriculture at Tufts is another building block that will help create the foundation for the cultivated meat workforce of the future.
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