Towards massive scale-up of low-cost growth factor production for meat cultivation
Innovate UK
Occam Biosciences Limited
Industrial livestock farming methods are associated with undesirable environmental impacts including greenhouse gas emissions, high water/land usage, and animal welfare/ public health concerns such as overuse of antibiotics and zoonoses. The worldwide population is expected to reach 8 billion by 15/11/2022, and 10 billion by 2050\. Finite resources and increasing worldwide meat consumption create conditions for global food insecurity. Cost-effective, disruptive innovations in production technology for nutritional proteins are therefore required for the industrialization of meat alternatives. Such a shift to **cultivated meat** (**CM**) production will disrupt this highly valuable global industry ($467 billion for beef in 2021). CM is meat grown from animal stem cells in a bioreactor using tissue engineering approaches. Stem cells are differentiated into cell types found in meat such as muscle and fat in specialized nutrient-enriched cell culture medium containing **growth factor** (**GF**) proteins. These cells are combined with scaffolds to form meat products. Thus, CM is produced in a controlled environment without farming animals for food, mitigating many of the concerns associated with conventional farming. **However, economic feasibility and scale-up are major barriers to the adoption and public acceptance of CM.** **Key cost drivers** are the **GF components** of culture media. Existing GF protein production and separation methods (a critical purification step) are prohibitively expensive to transition from laboratory to commercial production scale. _Indeed, modelling studies show current CM production costs between $50,000-400,000USD per kg using the growth factor FGF-2, at a cost of $5,000/mg in a 20,000L bioreactor. Only by reducing FGF-2 to nominal costs can we approach commodity level prices of $2 per kg._ **Our vision is to target this bottleneck enabling massive scale-up of low-cost growth factor production for meat cultivation**. To generate low-cost GFs, we will deploy our plant-based GF bulk-expression platform, and combine with novel low-cost alternatives for bioseparation/purification. This is achieved using an inexpensive approach exploiting sustainable commercially-available industrial food-grade substrates. Pilot data has shown this is an effective method for purifying crude protein extracts with high recovery of biological activity. Significant cost reductions for GF production are envisaged, with profound commercial, economic, sustainability and environmental impacts.
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