Cultivated meat, meet the organoid.
The rapid advance of technology used to create these small, three-dimensional collections of cells grown outside of a living being has created excitement over the past decade-plus in the medical research community, but now a startup named Foresea wants to use organoid technology not to save human lives, but instead that of eels and other seafood. The Israel-based startup, which today announced $5.2 million in seed funding according to a release sent to The Spoon, has developed a technology that utilizes organoids grown in bioreactors to produce eel meat.
According to the company, using organoids allows it to bypass the use of scaffolding, the technology typically used in cultivated meat creation to give meat its structure and texture. Forsea also claims that its technology can grow cultivated meat with fewer bioreactors as well as significantly less growth factors than is typically used in the cultivated meat creation process.
“While cell cultivation largely focuses on a system of directed differentiation, where cells are signaled to differentiate into a specific cell type and are then combined on a scaffold, our system grows the aggregate of the various cells already at the initial stage of the process,” Iftach Nachman, a cofounder of Foresea and inventor of the technology, explained. “The cells organize themselves autonomously into their innate, purposed structure, just as in nature.”
Forsea makes a point in their announcement that their technology creates standalone organisms utilizing an ex vivo methodology. This means that unlike in vitro (which literally translates to “in glass”) approaches where cells are isolated and separated from their natural biological surroundings, Foresea’s organoids are taken from living organisms and grown with minimal alteration from their natural conditions.
Forsea’s is one among a string of announcements over the past year focused on producing proteins at lower cost and with higher efficiency. Whether through new hybrid techniques, lower-cost growth factors, or new approaches to infrastructure, the cultivated meat industry’s focus has shifted beyond proving bench-scale viability to creating scalable solutions for mass-market production. With the introduction of the organoid as a platform for cultivated meat, Forsea has put an intriguing new approach on our watch list for the future of food.
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