At the early stage of industry development, the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) calls for cooperation between scientists, industry and non-profit organizations to drive the cultivated cell-based meat market forward through consortium. 

“Traditional farming puts increasing pressure on resources and the environment to feed a growing population, while cellular agriculture holds out the promise for a more sustainable and humane solution to growing and sacrificing animals for food,” the university notes.

By creating a technical solution to create meat products from growth cells in a bioreactor, it avoids the need for farm animals, large swaths of cleared land, and outsized feedstock, water and waste management demands.

The university highlights innovation as a driver for competition  and argues that cooperation helps the industry to advance faster, overcome technical challenges and share knowledge.

Tufts has launched a consortium including industry players and non-profit members to support and enhance cellular agriculture research. The members may individually decide what challenges to prioritize.

Sustainability focus
To feed millions of people with cell-cultivated meat, the university stresses some “important hurdles to overcome,” such as developing improved taste, texture and nutritional density as real meat. Last but not least, scaling up production to the quantity of feeding a hungry market. 

“While the potential for sustainability in cellular agriculture is great, competitors can benefit from sharing knowledge and methods to minimize environmental impacts, finding replacements for all animal sourced materials (other than the self-propagating cells) in the growth media, and evaluating the entire economic and environmental cost of production.”

Recently, the “world’s largest bioreactor” for cultivated meat production was introduced by Good Meat to fill the market gap and demand from consumers. When fully operational, the company will have the capacity to produce up to 30 million pounds of meat without the need to slaughter a single animal.

Last year in China, cell-based meat and the meat and protein alternatives’ sectors received funding from the government to scale-up production. 

Driving cultivated meat forward
Last year, Tufts received a grant of US$10 million from the US Department of Agriculture to establish a National Institute for Cellular Agriculture and to train the next generation of professionals in the field to combine physical, biological and social sciences toward building a new cellular agriculture industry.

The consortium has nine founding members, all in the cellular agriculture industry, including BioFeyn, Cargill, CellX, the Good Food Institute, MilliporeSigma, ThermoFisher Scientific, TurtleTree, Upside Foods and Vow. 

“We welcome new applicants that wish to join. Joining us will enable a company or organization with an interest in cellular agriculture to provide input on the projects to be funded by the consortium, and early access to the technology and knowledge that comes out of those projects,” says David Kaplan, stern family professor of engineering at Tufts and director at TUCCA.

Edited by Beatrice Wihlander