EAT JUST, INCThe biotech industry is chipping away at the obstacles standing
between the lab and the dinner plate.BY ABBY OLENAMade of Meat
BIO BUSINESSR
eza Ovissipour wants to make meat.
Earth’s population is projected to
reach 10 billion people by 2050.
To feed everyone, “we have to increase our
food production by one hundred percent
and our meat production by seventy per-
cent,” says Ovissipour, a food scientist at
Virginia Tech. “Our current agricultural
practices are not sustainable enough to
provide that much food for people, so we
need to find other ways to produce food.”
In September 2021, as part of efforts
to address this challenge, the United
States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
awarded a five-year, $10 million grant to
a multi-institute team of researchers,
including Ovissipour, for the creation
of a National Institute of Cellular Agri-
culture—the first ever investment by the
USDA in lab-based meat production. The
project, led by David Kaplan of Tufts Uni-
versity, will focus on scaling up cultured
meat, which has less of an environmen-
tal impact than traditional meat, to feed
Earth’s growing population.
In addition to helping humanity cope
with future food shortages, Ovissipour
says, cellular agriculture—the generation
of products from cells in a lab or indus-
trial setting rather than from whole ani-
mals—could have other benefits, such as
supplying alternative food for aquaculture
(currently, large farmed fish eat other fish,
either caught or farmed); reducing the risk
of pathogens, such as Salmonella, found in
livestock and farmed seafood; and improv-
ing the traceability of food products.
Lab meat’s potential has already
attracted significant interest from the
biotech industry. Already, more than 70
cultivated meat startups exist worldwide,
according to a 2020 state of the industry
report from the Good Food Institute, a
nonprofit that awards grants to research-ers working on so-called alternative pro-
teins and tracks progress in the industry.
And although there are substantial chal-
lenges in scaling up the technology and
getting products to the market, it’s a rap-
idly growing sector: in 2020, financial
investment in the area passed $350 mil-
lion—double the investment of all previ-
ous years combined. And in December of
that year, the world saw its first regula-
tory approval of the public sale of cultured
meat, from the Singapore Food Agency
(SFA), for chicken made by Eat Just, Inc.,
a San Francisco–based food company.
“Hopefully, that is the first of many,
and we’ll be starting to see more of it,” says
Claire Bomkamp, a scientist specializing in
cultivated seafood at the Good Food Insti-tute, “not just one or two restaurants, but
regular people being able to find this stuff.”The right cells
At a small scale, the process of cultivat-
ing meat shares its basic premise with
regular cell culture in the lab. Choosing
the right cells is important: some labs
grow muscle cells derived directly from
animals, while others prefer to start with
stem cells that can differentiate intoALMOST THE REAL THING: Lab-grown chicken
from Eat Just, Inc. became available to consumers
in Singapore at the private members club 1880
after the Singapore Food Agency granted it
regulatory approval in December 2020.68 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com