2024 saw some major investments, partnerships and innovations in the global cellular agriculture space. Below are the top five most-read stories from The Cell Base website this year.

Umami Bioworks and Shiok Meats to merge, creating cultured seafood platform

March saw Umami Bioworks and Shiok Meats unveil plans to merge, marking a significant development in the cultivated seafood sector. The merger aims to establish a global powerhouse in the growing market for sustainable seafood alternatives.

Agronomics announced that Shiok Meats (an Agronomics portfolio company) was acquired by Umami Bioworks in a share-for-share transaction.

The combined entity will leverage Umami Bioworks’ production platform and technologies, along with Shiok Meats’ expertise in crustacean cell cultivation. Both companies, headquartered in Singapore, anticipate collaborations that will enhance operational efficiencies, broaden commercial opportunities and expedite regulatory approvals for cultivated seafood products.

Mihir Pershad, CEO of Umami Bioworks, said: “Uniting Umami’s platform technologies around continuous biomanufacturing and machine learning-based automation with Shiok Meats’ groundbreaking crustacean work offers an expedited path to the cultivation of a range of sustainable seafood products”.

Sandhya Sriram, group CEO and co-founder of Shiok Meats, added: “The combined business means increased scale and speed to market in Asia and globally. The strong technology and team Umami has built will be the perfect custodian of the progress Shiok Meats has made on crustaceans, especially with our patent recently granted in the EU. I have always believed in consolidation to progress a novel industry like ours.”

Read more here.

Every secures foundational patent for precision-fermented ovalbumin

September saw US animal-free egg firm The Every Company granted with a foundational patent, US 12/096,784.

The patent strengthens Every's intellectual property portfolio and cements its position in food technology, specifically in precision-fermented egg proteins.

The patent generally covers any ingredient composition for food products that incorporates recombinant ovalbumin – the principal protein found in egg whites – combined with at least one additional consumable ingredient.

Ovalbumin constitutes over 54% of the protein in an egg white and is the protein most responsible for egg’s foaming, binding, gelling and nutritive properties across the applications where eggs and egg whites are used as ingredients.

The scope of this patent includes a range of innovations including:

🥚🍳 Wild-type ovalbumin variants with enhanced performance through various modifications

🥚🍳 Ovalbumin sourced from multiple avian species and production methods utilising a range of yeast and fungal systems such as pichia, trichoderma, saccharomyces and aspergillus

The patent spans an array of product formats, such as baked goods, binding for meat and meat analogues, ready-to-eat egg, whipped cream, ice cream and meringues, and addresses numerous functional applications including hardness, cohesiveness, springiness, chewiness and foam stability, in both liquid and powder forms.

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SuperMeat achieves breakthrough in cost parity for cultivated chicken

Last month, Israel’s SuperMeat announced groundbreaking innovations to make cultivated chicken affordable. With fat produced in 24 hours and muscle in four days, SuperMeat is able to deliver high yields at speed.

These advancements enable SuperMeat to produce chicken at $11.79 per pound at scale, which is on par with pasture-raised premium chicken in the US. This breakthrough marks a crucial step toward the commercialisation of cultivated chicken.

SuperMeat can produce fat within 24 hours and muscle in four days – leading to faster production cycles and higher volumes. The start-up says that this approach delivers the full sensory experience of chicken, providing the texture, taste and nutrition consumers expect from conventional meat, while advancing cost efficiency at scale.

SuperMeat’s process begins with a nine-day cell growth phase to reach high cell densities, followed by a 45-day period where meat mass is harvested daily while the remaining cells continue to grow. In a compact 10-litre bioreactor run, this continuous process produces around 66 pounds of cultivated chicken, demonstrating the high efficiency of the system, which requires minimal space and resources compared to conventional methods.

Once the continuous process is established, SuperMeat can produce 3 pounds of meat – the equivalent amount of edible meat received from slaughtering one chicken – in 2 days, compared to the 42 days it takes to raise and process a traditional chicken. Additionally, with current production parameters, cultivating 1kg (2.2 pounds) of chicken requires 80% less land than conventional chicken farming.

Read more here.

Finnish researchers develop tech to produce cultured meat without growth factors

In June, researchers at the University of Helsinki’s Helsinki Institute of Life Science (HiLIFE) unveiled a method to produce cultivated meat that does not rely on growth factors.

Pekka Katajisto and his colleagues hope to solve the problem of scaling-up cell-based meat – namely expensive growth factors – with the new tech they are developing in their Myocopia project.

Currently, cultivated meat relies on growth factors to make the cells grow and differentiate – the Myocopia team takes another approach and controls the same processes by affecting cellular metabolism.

The researchers studied how cellular metabolism regulates the division and differentiation of stem cells. Their basic research on the metabolism of muscle stem cells led to an innovation that can keep the cells expanding longer than with current methods. This enables the precise control of cells in meat-producing bioreactors.

“The cells can be kept multiplying in a financially viable way until the reactor is full. The cells are then guided to form meat – again using their own metabolism,” Katajisto added.

With the technology developed by Myocopia, the metabolism of cells can be modified so that they divide effectively and form meat only when instructed to do so. The researchers expect this to facilitate the large-scale production of cell-based meat, in turn making cultivated meat products affordable for consumers.

Patenting of the technology has begun, and the Myocopia researchers expect discussions with VC funds to take place in 2025.

Read more here.

Cell-based meat production costs could fall significantly with new tech

In January, researchers at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) created bovine muscle cells that produce their own growth factors, a step that can significantly cut costs of the production of cell-based beef.

In a study published in Cell Reports Sustainability journal, researchers successfully modified bovine muscle cells to produce fibroblast growth factors (FGF). Muscle cells are the primary type found in products like steaks and hamburgers – FGF plays a crucial role in the development and differentiation of these cells.

Andrew Stout, director of science at the Tufts Cellular Agriculture Commercialisation Lab (CACL) and lead researcher on the project, said: “FGF is not exactly a nutrient. It’s more like an instruction for the cells to behave in a certain way. What we did was engineer bovine muscle stem cells to produce these growth factors and turn on the signalling pathways themselves.”

“While we significantly cut the cost of media, there is still some optimisation that needs to be done to make it industry ready. We did see slower growth with the engineered cells, but I think we can overcome that.”

Such strategies could include changing the level and timing of expression of FGF in the cell or altering other cell growth pathways. Stout explained: “In this strategy, we’re not adding foreign genes to the cell, just editing and expressing genes that are already there,” to see if they can improve the growth of the muscle cells for meat production.

Stout said that this approach could lead to simpler regulatory approval of the ultimate food product as regulation is more stringent for the addition of foreign genes rather than the editing of native genes. He says the strategy could be transferrable to different proteins such as fish and chicken as “all muscle cells and many other cell types typically rely on FGF to grow”.

Read more here.