There is still a dearth of infrastructure for raised meat.
Speakers at Tufts University’s second annual Cellular Agriculture Innovation Day stated that significant upgrades to infrastructure and manufacturing capacity will be required in order to achieve commodity price and scale for cultured meat.
The gathering gathered together academics, financiers, entrepreneurs, and other specialists in farmed meat to deliberate on a number of urgent issues during panel discussions, one of which addressed the difficulties associated with infrastructure and scaling.
The founder and CEO of Ark Biotech, a bioreactor manufacturer, Yossi Quint, emphasized the status of the infrastructure for cultured meat by highlighting the capabilities of Samsung Biologics, a South Korean cell culture facility that is among the largest in the world.
Quint stated, “Samsung Biologics would produce less cultivated meat in a single day than the average Tyson facility produces if they were to run nonstop for a whole year.”
Quint estimates that the current output of the Samsung Biologics facility would need to rise by around 10,000 times in order to reach equal production rates. To get around the output gap and achieve economies of scale, bigger bioreactors, easier-to-access cell medium, and improved filtration and bioprocessing will all be essential. Production automation will probably be necessary as well because there is now a shortage of the skilled scientific labor required for operations of this scale.
Quint stated, “Thinking about a 10,000x increase is not about incremental changes.” We are discussing a revolution in terms of redefining infrastructure.
But for businesses looking to produce whole-cut farmed meat, scaling such infrastructure might not be as practical. Scaffolding material is used in the development of whole cut grown goods to support cells and facilitate the vascularization process, which improves the tissue’s delivery of oxygen and nutrients. The edible scaffolds need to be included into the bioreactors; in the end, each bioreactor is consumed to produce a single unit of whole-cut meat. A focus on scaling up would be unfeasible due to the bioreactors’ single-use design and biological constraints that restrict the size at which whole-cut meats may be produced.
“I am not aware of any company that is announcing that they will cultivate a 1,000-kilogram piece of whole-cut meat,” stated Ryan Silvia, MilliporeSigma’s program manager for cultured meat scaffolding research and development. “It seems like a scale-out strategy rather than a scale-up strategy will be used for whole-cut meat.”
A few speakers brought up shared infrastructure and pilot-scale manufacturing as potential practical ways to boost businesses’ capacities and lower the amount of initial funding required when talking about more urgent fixes.
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“An additional approach to mitigating the risks associated with the field’s development is to consider ways to build out capital-intensive infrastructure in a more accessible or communal manner,” stated Lily Fitzgerald, senior manager of advanced technology programs at Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, a state agency promoting economic development. “I believe that a pilot scale is appropriate for this type of communal sharing model in order to reduce the risk associated with a single, particular type of infrastructure.”