Cultivated food pioneer Aleph Farms is leveraging Enzymit bioproduction AI and deep learning capabilities to develop insulin alternatives. New insulin substituents could make cultured meat more affordable and accessible and bring it to scale while reducing production time. 

“This project already decreases the price of insulin by at least 80% but, more importantly, it serves as a proof of concept for innovations like protein structure-function that further advances our cost-reduction paths,” Neta Lavon, PhD, CTO of Aleph Farms, tells FoodIngredientsFirst.   

“Producing novel processing aids like the one we’ve designed with Enzymit plays a significant role in our cost reduction and scale-up strategies,” she adds.

Aleph Farms will use the new insulins for cow cell-based meat cultivation.

Designing alternatives
Enzymit used its computational design algorithms and testing capabilities to develop a variety of insulin substituents and test their functionality. 

All of the seleced proteins were soluble proteins that could be produced in E. coli (the bacteria reads the gene and makes the protein) and purified without the need for refolding, complex purification steps or other treatmentsFurther screening identified several leading candidate proteins that showed superior cell culture activity results and required minimal activation concentration. 

These new proteins, which require “significantly” fewer downstream purification and maturation processes, reduce production time and costs.

“With recombinant proteins currently accounting for the overwhelming majority of cell culture costs, creating highly stable and more active insulin substituents can markedly reduce the cost of growth media and increase efficiency in producing cultivated meat at scale,” adds Gideon Lapidoth, PhD, CEO of Enzymit.

Solving the serum availability problem
Lavon explains that one of the biggest challenges in making cultivated meat is finding a way to get the cells to grow quickly and efficiently. One conventional method has been to add proteins to the growth medium – the liquid in which the cells are grown. 

However, she highlights animal-derived proteins are still “prohibitively expensive” and often unavailable in large quantities.

“Developing more suitable processing aids for the production of cultivated meat is imperative for driving economies of scale and taking cultivated meat mainstream,” she says.

“This innovation, combining Enzymit’s outstanding protein design and experimental capabilities with our team’s expertise in cellular agriculture, is helping to build the foundations for our sector to achieve cost-efficiency and long-term impact.”

Far reaching applicability

According to Lavon, the success of this collaboration opens the door to additional benefits “far beyond the cultivation of cow cells.” As insulin is a highly conserved protein across mammals and other species, it has the potential to similarly influence the production of other cultivated meat types, such as porcine, ovine and poultry. 

“Conventional beef is especially resource-intensive and has high carbon and methane footprints, so as part of our mission to support a just and inclusive transition to sustainable and secure food systems, focusing on cow cells enables us to maximize our impact in terms of protecting the climate,” says Lavon. 

“The ‘three Rs’ (reduce, reuse and recycle) is key in our work as we continue scaling while carefully managing our environmental footprint on an ongoing basis. By designing processing aids with greater desired activity per molecule, we reduce the cumulative amount of such ingredients used in the growth media and can reduce our overall environmental impact,” she notes.

The insulin innovation arrives some weeks after Israel granted the first cellular agriculture approval in the country. Remilk received “first-of-its-kind” approval from the Israeli Ministry of Health, making it the first animal-free dairy protein company permitted to sell and market its product across Israel.

Meanwhile, the European Food Safety Authority announced last week that its food safety experts are prepared to receive the first commercial wave of EU requests for the market authorization of cell-based foods.