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.