Cell based meat company, Meatable, may arguably be overcoming the challenges associated with bringing cell based meat to market.
Cell Based Meat Challenges:
- Slow Doubling Time: it takes 20,000 strands of muscle fiber to form a burger, this process can take up to 3 months.
- Limited Life Span: muscle pre-cursor cells have a limited lifespan and will regularly need replenishing in the form of tissue biopsies from the animal.
- Animal Based Serum: The most viable cell culture medium on the market contains fetal bovine serum, which is blood taken from an unborn calf whose mother was slaughtered — making the process reliant on the current system of slaughterhouse agriculture.
What Meatable Is Doing: Meatable is licensing a proprietary technology called, OPTi-OX, which was developed by Dr. Mark Kotter (neurosurgery clinician scientist and lecturer at University of Cambridge) and his team at Elpis BioMed. OPTi-OX is a form of genetic intervention that converts pluripotent stem cells into any desired cell type. Learn more about how this technology works here.
Solutions via Meatable with OPTi-OX:
- Faster Doubling Time: 20,000 strands of muscle fiber in 3-5 days with OPTi-OX.
- Indefinite Life Span: a single vial of stem cells sourced from a single umbilical cord proliferate indefinitely.
- Animal Free Serum: The cells grow off of E8, a completely animal free cell culture medium made up of amino acids, vitamins, minerals and salts.
Meatable is currently working on isolating the cells, so once the company reaches the phase of adding OPTi-OX, they will produce consistent and homogeneous cell batches in a matter of days.
Meatable CTO, Daan Luining, says that they’ll be producing cell based meat in a self perpetuating small scale bioreactor by 2021. Daan anticipates cell based meat will be consumer affordable in 6-8 years.
