David E. Block, PhD

Professor and Marvin Sands Department Chair
Department of Viticulture and Enology, Department of Chemical Engineering

University of California, Davis

Creating Real Steak Without the Cow: Overcoming the Technical Hurdles to Commercialization of Cultivated Meat

Abstract

Between a growing global population and increased consumption of meat from developing countries, it is projected that meat production will have to increase by at least 60% by 2050 to meet demand.  It is unlikely that expanded conventional animal agriculture alone will be able to meet this need.  Therefore, alternatives to conventional meat will be required at a very large scale.  This is likely to include plant- and fungal-based meat alternatives, as well as cultivated meat—the growth of animal stem cells in large-scale fermentors with subsequent differentiation into muscle, fat, and connective tissue cells.  While close to 150 companies have formed in the last seven years internationally to commercialize this technology, only one product is currently on the market, a chicken nugget sold at two restaurants in Singapore.  Aside from federal regulatory hurdles, difficult technical hurdles remain.  These include development of cell lines well-suited for production, inexpensive growth and differentiation media, creation of structure into whole cuts like marbled steaks, and scale-up to a commercial size potentially 10 times larger than anything previously attempted for cell-culture-based processes.  After presenting the field and our consortium-based approach to addressing these hurdles, this talk will focus on media optimization using both spent media analysis and AI-based efficient experimental design techniques for complex optimization problems.  In addition, initial efforts to facilitate the scale-up of processing will be discussed.