WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Why grow cows in fields when you can just grow the steaks sustainably in a lab? Food is being re-invented …

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After numerous breakthroughs in growing meat from just the cells of animals to produce everything from lab made beef, chicken, duck, fish, and even lion and zebra, Zürich-based startup Mirai Foods has made another breakthrough in the cultivated meat industry. They developed a technique that efficiently cultivates muscle tissue that mimics conventional meat, resulting in what it calls the “world’s first cultivated tenderloin steak,” according to the press release.

While other types of meat can be produced in the lab, the fillet steak is considered a significant challenge because of its complex structure consisting of different cell types. According to Christoph Mayr, CEO and co-founder of Mirai Foods, the technology used for producing this steak is called Fibration Technology, for which they have filed three international patents.

The Future of Food, by keynote speaker Matthew Griffin

The first cultivated tender steak comes from Mirai Foods’ in-house developed bioreactor, “The Rocket.” The process requires long, mature, cultivated muscle fibers, which are combined with enzymes and supplemented with cultivated fat tissue. After five days in the bioreactor, “a tenderloin centerpiece is complete, from which steaks of almost any thickness can be cut.”

According to Suman Das, CSO and co-founder of Mirai Foods, the technology can provide a real alternative to conventional meat, allowing people to prepare and eat authentic steak without harming the climate or animals.

Mirai Foods is one of the few cultivated meat companies in the world capable of producing meat without using genetic engineering, a technology that is heavily restricted in the E.U. The company claims that its meat meets the highest standards of taste, quality, and health while remaining in line with the preferences of European consumers.

The company is building on the industry’s efforts to produce whole cuts of meat through cultivation. While most of the products so far have resembled mince beef for use in burgers and nuggets, BSF Enterprises debuted a whole-cultivated pork loin in 2023, and Japanese researchers have also developed a whole-cut steak from cultured cells.

Mirai’s cultivated meat has already attracted investors, including Angst AG, a food and meat producer based in Zürich. The company plans to bring Mirai’s cultivated meat into its range of offerings once the technology has received regulatory approval. Mirai Foods was launched in 2019 and has raised more than $5 million in funding in a 2021 Seed round.

The company’s achievement is an important step towards sustainable meat production. With the expected doubling of demand for meat by 2050, conventional methods of meat production cannot meet this demand in a sustainable way. Developing sustainable and ethical meat production methods, such as Fibration Technology, can reduce the environmental impact of meat production and provide a real alternative to conventional meat.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Once oil wells are tapped out they’re capped, but now they’re getting a new lease of life after bacteria injected into them turn them into green hydrogen fuel sources.

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You’ve probably heard of hydrogen fuel and all its many colours … First there’s grey hydrogen fuel, where energy from coal is used to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, then there’s blue hydrogen, which is normally made from natural gas, and then there’s green hydrogen which is made from renewable energy and which is the pinnacle of hydrogen fuels. Now though there’s another kind of hydrogen – gold hydrogen.

There was no prospect of getting any more oil out of the old well. It was just a depleted cavern hiding beneath the sun-baked Texas soil. But then some folks came along and squirted a special liquid into it. They went away for five days, and when they came back it was no longer an oil well. It had transformed into a hydrogen source.

Cemvita Factory, a biotech firm in Texas, had spritzed a carefully selected combination of bacteria and nutrients down the bore hole. Once inside the well, the microbes began breaking down the residual oil hydrocarbons in there – dregs that would be unprofitable to extract – to generate hydrogen and CO₂. This field test in July, though small in scale, was a “huge success,” says chief business officer Charles Nelson.

Nelson would not comment on what bacteria and nutrients the company is using, but he says his firm aims to produce hydrogen for $1 per kilogram, which would be competitive against other methods of obtaining the fuel. He estimates there are more than 1,000 depleted oil wells dotted around the US that are suitable for the same kind of microbial treatment: “A lot of these reservoirs are abandoned, they’re in the custody of the state, they’re orphaned and waiting to be cleaned up.”

Hydrogen, which releases zero carbon emissions when burned, has long been touted as a future fuel. Even though it’s the most abundant element in the universe, with copious amounts on the Earth’s surface in molecules such as water, some effort is required to obtain large quantities of pure hydrogen. There’s a long list of techniques currently vying for supremacy. People have taken to color-coding them, and there is now a veritable rainbow to choose from.

Cemvita Factory describes its product as gold hydrogen “to pay homage to the past era of oil as the black gold and it now being used as a feedstock to make subsurface hydrogen,” says cofounder and CEO Moji Karimi.

Nelson explains that the firm’s goal is to treat oil wells with bacteria to enable steady, long-term hydrogen production – perhaps lasting for decades. Existing, disused infrastructure above and around the well for taking off gasses could be brought back into service in order to collect the hydrogen, he adds.

It will be important to prevent the CO₂ by product from leaking into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change, however. Cemvita Factory argues that it can keep the CO₂ locked underground, use other microbes to fix it somehow, or find commercial uses for the greenhouse gas. There could be barriers to simply storing it below ground, though. A major blue hydrogen project in Louisiana is currently on hold due to local opposition over a plan to store any CO₂ generated beneath a lake, as some residents fear it could pollute local water resources. Exactly what solution Cemvita would use in each location – and how successfully – isn’t yet known.

Capturing or otherwise neutralizing the CO₂ must be done safely, says Stephen Wallace, who runs a microbiology lab at the University of Edinburgh. But he adds that Cemvita Factory’s idea of harnessing microbes for hydrogen production is “indicative of a lot of the really interesting work going on in biotechnology right now.” Wallace and his colleagues are themselves experimenting with bioreactors and have had some success in getting microbes to yield hydrogen from things like moldy bread or the lignin in paper industry waste.

But while some microbes help produce hydrogen, others are the scourge of these projects, as they can eat up stored hydrogen or consume the gas in natural wells, says Jon Gluyas, a geologist at Durham University. “We’re trying to keep bacteria away from our hydrogen because they love feasting on it,” he explains.

And he has another quibble. He argues that “gold hydrogen” is different from what Cemvita Factory is proposing. To Gluyas, that term refers specifically to hydrogen that has been produced naturally underground. He should know. “I named it,” he says. That Cemvita has given the same name to its hydrogen – which, the company makes clear, is “produced biologically, by microbes, and through a human-driven process” – is just a “coincidence,” Karimi claims.

For more than a century, geologists have been pondering how much of the natural hydrogen to which Gluyas refers could be freely available in the ground beneath our feet. The German scientist Ernst Erdmann described in 1910 how he had detected an outflow of hydrogen at a salt mine and tracked it for four and a half years. But the possibility of widespread subterranean sources was still poorly understood, even into the 1980s, says Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a geologist at the University of Toronto.

She recalls surveying sites for gasses back then and realizing that significant volumes of hydrogen were present in the ground. “Good lord, it was hydrogen, these rocks were full of hydrogen,” she remembers. Yes, the Earth hath bubbles. Since then, she and colleagues have mapped the locations of potential hydrogen sources – based on geology and known deposits – around the world.

Different processes can give rise to natural hydrogen wells. One example is radiolysis, in which subatomic particles naturally emitted by radioactive rocks such as granite cause certain molecules to break apart, releasing hydrogen. In general, hydrogen is associated with crystalline rocks, rather than sedimentary ones.

But as Gluyas mentions, microbes often gobble up hydrogen formed in the ground before anyone has had the chance to siphon it off. So the tricky part is finding a subterranean hydrogen source that is both large and intact.

“No one, I think, can pronounce on whether or not these accumulations of hydrogen within the crystalline rocks … will be viable at scale,” says Sherwood Lollar.

Some firms are already targeting hydrogen deposits, though such as the company Gold Hydrogen in Australia. It estimates that there could be a total of 1.3 billion kilograms of hydrogen at depths of around 500 meters in the Ramsay Peninsula and Kangaroo Island in South Australia. There is also a large and well-known source of hydrogen in Mali. Both this and the Australian deposits are associated with “fairy circles” – where bare patches in the middle of vegetation indicate that hydrogen is coming out of the ground. Commercial extraction of hydrogen from any such locations, at scale, has yet to happen.

Whether you call Cemvita Factory’s approach “gold hydrogen” or not, one advantage of it is that access to oil wells is reasonably straightforward – and they are often in well-serviced locations with nearby infrastructure for transporting gasses. Cemvita Factory is not the only firm to have considered this point. A completely different method of getting hydrogen out of old oil wells involves injecting oxygen into them to stimulate a flow of oil and chemical reactions that result in the production of hydrogen and other gasses. Canadian firm Proton Technologies has demonstrated this technique—which it refers to as “clear hydrogen.”

Hydrogen production linked to depleted oil wells is interesting, but such projects are still at a relatively early stage, argues Richard Lowes, senior associate at the Regulatory Assistance Project, a clean energy NGO. “I’m initially skeptical, particularly when you can produce hydrogen quite easily with electricity—it’s just easier,” he says. And he questions whether such technologies could potentially shore up fossil fuel firms and fossil-fuel-related industries, in contrast to hydrogen production systems that rely on renewables. If new oil wells can eventually be transformed into green energy sources, they may appear more palatable.

All of these ideas for obtaining hydrogen are currently jostling for attention and investment. That, and the abundance of this crucial element in so many different places explains the rich color palette of hydrogens now emerging. From green to blue, gold, clear, and beyond, no one yet knows what will triumph.

As Gluyas says: “We’ll probably have more colors than Crown Paints by the end of this process.”

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Why raise chickens for meat when you can just grow that meat in a lab without all the anti-biotics, environmental damage, and nuisance?

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A few years ago if you wanted to buy a chicken nugget, or a burger, then that meat would have come from an animal, but now thanks to Cellular Agriculture, which uses an advanced manufacturing technology called a bio-reactor to grow meat without the animal, you don’t need the animal any longer. And while you couldn’t buy meat cultivated in this way in the US you could in Singapore after the government passed regulations to allow its sale a couple of years ago. Now though, if you live in the US you can buy it soon too after the FDA gave it the thumbs up.

In 2020, cultured meat startup Memphis Meats raised $161 million in Series B funding, making it the most-funded startup in the industry. The investment validated cultured meat’s technological soundness and indicated that consumer interest in these products was likely to grow.

After changing its name to Upside Foods in 2021, the company received an additional $400 million in Series C funding this past April. Now they’ve reached another milestone: this week the FDA granted the company the first approval needed to bring its meat to consumers.

Learn more about feeing 8 Billion people, by keynote Matthew Griffin

The approval is called a No Questions letter and means that after conducting a thorough evaluation the FDA concluded that Upside’s lab made poultry is safe to eat. The letter doesn’t apply to all of the company’s products, only to its cultured chicken for now; additional offerings will have to undergo the same FDA evaluation process.

“This milestone marks a major step towards a new era in meat production, and I’m thrilled that US consumers will soon have the chance to eat delicious meat that’s grown directly from animal cells,” said Dr. Uma Valeti, Upside’s CEO and founder.

The No Questions letter isn’t an easy approval to lock down, and now that Upside has it, the remaining steps to start selling its chicken should move relatively quickly. The company’s production facilities and the chicken itself will both need to pass USDA inspections and receive seals of approval.

A year ago Upside opened its EPIC facility, a 53,000-square-foot center for engineering, production, and innovation in Emeryville, California. Not all of the space is operational yet, but the facility will eventually be able to produce multiple types of lab made meat, poultry, and seafood; Upside plans to initially make more than 50,000 pounds of meat per year there, scaling up to more than 400,000 pounds per year.

Once the company receives the remaining two approvals it needs, its cultured chicken won’t be available in grocery stores right away; curious consumers will first be able to try it in select restaurants.

“We would want to bring this to people through chefs in the initial stage,” Valeti said. “We want to work with the best partners who know how to cook well, and also give us feedback on what we could do better.” The first to sign on is Dominique Crenn, a Michelin-starred chef who runs Atelier Crenn restaurant in San Francisco.

Cultured meat is made by harvesting muscle cells from an animal then feeding those cells a mixture of nutrients and growth factors so that they multiply, differentiate, then grow to form muscle tissue; it’s not terribly different from the way muscle grows in vivo. But the bio-reactors where growth happens don’t produce ready-to-eat cuts of meat. The harvested cells need to be refined and shaped into a final product, which could involve extrusion cooking, molding, and even 3D printing.

This process isn’t cheap, especially because it’s still in its very early years and hasn’t yet been scaled to any significant level. Upside doesn’t share details of its production costs, but it seems the per-unit cost of cultured meat is generally trending downward: last year the cost of lab-grown chicken reached $7.70 per pound, as compared to an average at the time of $3.62 per pound for conventional chicken.

Valeti plans to focus on scaling production over the next few years. He’s not alone; competitor Good Meat is planning to build a large cultured meat production facility in the US, aiming for domestic production to start by late 2024.

Besides lowering costs, raising consumer awareness about the benefits of cultured meat products will also be key; namely, that they’re better for animals and for the environment but offer an identical nutritional profile to farmed meat.

Valeti seems optimistic. “Our goal is to introduce consumers to cultivated meat to dispel any confusion with meat alternatives,” he said. “This is going to open up the entire cultivated meat space, and as the pioneer, we are writing the playbook and sharing it with people… the consumer will fall in love with this.”

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

If you don’t need animals to make meat you don’t need to feed them crops or water, deforest the Amazon, or figure out ways to eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions …

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Meat used to come from animals, but now it comes from just the cells of animals grown in bioreactors in labs – a new food production method called “Cultivated Meat.” And not only is this new method getting cheaper, but from Singapore to the US people can now buy, for example, chicken nuggets made in this way from restaurants and supermarkets.

In order to meet the growing demand for meat made in this way just under a year ago one of the biggest production facilities for cultured meat opened in Israel. Future Meat Technologies’ Rehovot plant produces 500 kilograms of lab grown meat per day – that’s equivalent to about 5,000 burger patties – and last week the company revealed plans for an even bigger facility, this one in the US. Its specific location has yet to be finalised, but the project will bring cultured meat production to an unprecedented scale.

The Future of Food, by keynote speaker Matthew Griffin

The bioreactors planned for the US facility will be over 40 feet tall and will hold 250,000 liters, that’s 66,043 gallons, of meat which could be used to create over 200,000 burger patties each day – a scale which significantly changes the economics of the industry and its future.

Needless to say this is a massive scale up from existing technology and the same manufacturer that’s making the US gear, ABEC, is also making a smaller 6,000 litre bioreactor for a facility in Singapore which when it becomes operational in 2023 will be the biggest of its kind installed to date until the US factory goes online.

Multiplying that by more than a factor of 40 then and making sure the quality of the final product is still the same will be no small feat.

The company behind the new mega project is California based Good Meat. Though the company has been selling its lab grown chicken in Singapore since 2020 it’s still awaiting FDA approval to sell its products in the US, but that’s not stopping it from going ahead with the ambitious plans for the new facility, though.

“The bioreactors will be far and away the largest, not only in the cultivated meat industry, but in the biopharma industry too,” said Josh Tetrick, CEO of Good Meat’s parent company, Eat Just. “So the design and engineering challenges are significant, the capital investments are significant, and the potential to take another step toward shifting society away from slaughtered meat is significant.”

Cultivated meat – not to be confused with plant based meat – is grown from animal cells and is biologically the same as meat that comes from an animal. The process starts with harvesting muscle cells from an animal, then feeding those cells a mixture of nutrients and naturally occurring growth factors or, as Good Meat’s process specifies, amino acids, fats, and vitamins, so that they multiply, differentiate, then grow to form muscle tissue in much the same way muscle grows inside animals’ bodies.

According to Good Meat’s website, they use cells from only “the best” chickens and cows, and carefully choose cells most likely to produce flavourful, sustainable meat. Besides being used as starters to grow edible meat in bioreactors, the cells are also “immortalised,” growing and dividing over and over; cells from one chicken could end up producing thousands of breasts.

“Cultivated meat matters because it will enable us to eat meat without all the harm, without bulldozing forests, without the need to slaughter an animal, without the need to use antibiotics, without accelerating zoonotic diseases,” Tetrick said.

Meat can be “harvested” just four to six weeks after initiating the growth process but it’s not a matter of plucking a ready-to-package breast from a vat and shipping it off to the grocery store. Besides going through safety and regulatory reviews, the harvested cells need to be turned into something resembling traditional meat. Good Meat says it uses 3D printing, extrusion cooking, and molding to refine the shape and texture of the product.

This all starts to sound a little Franken-meaty, but the company emphasizes that its products have nutritional profiles identical to those of conventionally raised meat. A few of the “final formats” the meat comes in include chicken nugget bites, sausages, shredded chicken, and chicken breasts.

It’s going to take a long time for factory farming to stop being a thing, but as cultivated meat continues to become more scalable, that day could be on the horizon. Tetrick thinks it’ll happen within his generation’s lifetime.

“I think our grandchildren are going to ask us about why we ate meat from slaughtered animals back in 2022,” he said.

Good Meat is expected to finalize the location of its US plant before summer’s end, and they’re aiming for domestic production to start by late 2024.

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Pollution isn’t sexy, no influencer will spend their time poking creating content about it, but it’s killing people and the environment and we need solutions.

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Let’s face it, you probably don’t spend much, if any, of your time thinking about wastewater, but increasingly it’s polluting our rivers and seas and in many areas causing bio-diversity collapse. So, we need to find new ways to treat and clean it.

Industrial waste water generally contains a wide variety of substances, many of which are harmful to the environment. These range from organic compounds that take a long time to degrade, to toxic and even radioactive substances, to acids and heavy metals. To recover such toxic metals from wastewater originating, for example, from coal mines or electroplating plants, a group of scientists working on the BIOMIMIC project has developed biotechnological processes to remove metals and sulfate from mine wastewater.

To do this, the researchers studied three wastewater streams in three countries. In Germany, they looked at mine water from abandoned mining tunnels in Saxony. In Ireland, they examined leachate from the red mud storage of an alumina manufacturing plant, and in Sweden, they looked at solutions produced during the leaching of ash from a waste incineration plant.

On the German side, the “Impact” sub-project was coordinated by the Fraunhofer ISI. Here, researchers evaluated the potential benefits of the processes developed under BIOMIMIC in terms of “what contribution they can make to the EU’s security of supply of critical raw materials, how they are economically feasible, and what their ecological advantages and disadvantages are.”

G.E.O.S. Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH, the second German partner, developed a sulfate reduction process in the “Process Engineering” subproject, which was demonstrated on a small scale. With this process, water containing metals and sulfates can largely be removed from wastewater using a moving bed bioreactor. More than 90 percent of the metals can be separated as metal sulfides and over 99 percent of the toxic substances, as well as more than 60 percent of the sulfate, can be removed. A major advantage of the process in practice is that no gas supply is required so the control engineering effort is very low. Plus, the amount of residual material that cannot be recycled is one-tenth of the initial product, significantly less than in chemical treatment processes, the scientists are pleased to report.

The other eight project partners have also been able to show that processes with sulfate-reducing bacteria are very well suited to removing metals and sulfate from wastewater, thus recovering the valuable metals. Leachate from the alumina manufacturing plant in Ireland is treated in a dedicated facility for a biosorption process.

According to an impact assessment by Fraunhofer ISI, the advanced processes have the technical capability to remove metal contaminants from wastewater streams. Although the potential contribution of this treatment to EU supply security is rather small, the scientists admit, the potential for solving local environmental problems should not be underestimated.

Until now, with these new biological processes, wastewater treatment has generally been carried out using chemical processes, which in turn have negative effects of their own. But according to the researchers, in order for the two processes developed within BIOMIMIC to represent a more environmentally friendly and economically feasible alternative to traditional chemical processes in the long term, they must be further optimized in terms of their ecological and economic performance

Among other things, they say, the process could be improved with sulfate-reducing bacteria by increasing energy efficiency. Waste streams could also be used to generate energy and carbon for the process. In the biosorption process, the use of biochar has environmental and economic advantages over hydrochar.

“The treatment of industrial wastewater often does not offer economic profit opportunities for companies, even if the wastewater streams contain supply-critical metals, as in the cases studied here,” explains project leader Dr. Sabine Langkau, who heads the Sustainability Innovations and Policy business unit at Fraunhofer ISI. “Therefore, legal requirements, such as the current EU Water Framework Directive, are still needed to bring wastewater treatment processes into use to solve local environmental problems. In addition, an assessment of the ecological and economic impact of the processes, taking into account the amounts of energy and chemicals used, can help optimize the processes and select the most appropriate one.”

The BIOMIMIC project involved 10 European partners working on several subprojects. They were funded within the framework of the transnational call for proposals of the ERA-Net ERA-MIN 2. The two German subprojects “Impact” and “Process Engineering” were funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Today we can take the cells from plants and animals and grow coffee, dairy, fish, and meat in a lab, and it’s changing how we produce food.

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Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, was hit by a historic frost in July 2021. Temperatures in coffee fields dropped below zero and the beans became encased in ice. The cold snap came right after the worst drought the country had seen in almost a century, which had already weakened the coffee trees. As a result, the price of coffee has shot to a seven-year high in anticipation of a poor harvest next year.

As a tropical crop that dislikes temperature variations and only grows in a narrow belt around the equator, coffee is extremely vulnerable to climate change. It is also contributing to it, because demand for coffee keeps rising worldwide, making it a key driver of deforestation. Add to the mix disease and pests, which have wiped out crops in many coffee growing regions, and it’s easy to see why people are searching for alternative ways of growing coffee, such as creating the world’s first molecular coffee or growing it in a lab instead …

In a lab near Helsinki, where coffee has been successfully grown and brewed using cellular agriculture a revolution is  brewing – literally.

“We started with a leaf,” says Heiko Rischer of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, a state-owned, non-profit technology company. The process involves sterilising a coffee plant leaf to get rid of unwanted contaminants and placing it on a base of nutrients, such as minerals and sugars, to stimulate cell growth. Once that is achieved, the cells are moved to a bioreactor, a temperature controlled container with a liquid suspension in which the culture can grow further. As more and more biomass is produced, it is transferred to progressively larger bioreactors until it’s ready to be harvested; the process takes roughly two weeks.

“The powder we end up with is a very different material from coffee beans, and roasting is a bit more tricky — that’s an art in itself and we are by no means professional roasters,” says Rischer. However, a tasting by a human panel gave encouraging results: “This is close to coffee. Not exactly the same, and not what you would expect from a high grade coffee, but it resembles it very much and the different roasting levels actually gave different flavours,” says Rischer. An instrument-based analysis returned a similar verdict, showing “significant overlaps” with the flavour profile of conventional coffee.

There’s room for improvement: “The beauty of this kind of technology is that the composition of the final product, for example caffeine content, can be steered quite a lot by adjusting certain conditions,” says Rischer. That might mean changing parameters such as the amount of oxygen or the mixing speed in the bioreactor, or adding chemical triggers called elicitors that induce the formation of a desired compound. The next step for VTT is partnering with companies willing to invest in this kind of cellular agriculture, which they are testing on a range of plant species, including some endangered wild Nordic berries.

While there won’t be a shortage of tasters — Finland is the world leader in coffee consumption per capita — regulations could pose a few hurdles: “In Europe, we would need to go through an approval process just to let people try this. Even internally we had issues, because for this kind of experimental material we need the approval of our ethical committee, which we got in this case,” says Rischer, adding that in the most optimistic scenario, the coffee could be commercially ready in about four years.

If you can’t wait that long, there’s a molecular coffee you can buy today that does away with the coffee plant entirely. Made by Seattle-based Atomo Coffee, it’s a “molecular cold brew” sold in a can that comes in two flavours. It’s made from upcycled plant waste products: mostly date seeds, with some chicory roots and grape skins. These undergo a chemical process and are mixed with dietary fibre, flavourings and caffeine, creating a drink that produces 93 per cent less carbon emissions and uses 94 per cent less water than conventional coffee, according to Atomo.

“This is molecularly and organoleptically analogous to conventional coffee — it is coffee,” says Atomo co-founder Jarret Stopforth.

Atomo debuted in late September and quickly sold out, despite a hefty price tag of $60 for each bundle of eight cans.

“We are only able to do limited scale right now. We realise it seems like a high price, but this is the first launch into the market; we will be able to match the cost of premium conventional coffee as we grow and scale,” says Stopforth. It will take a couple of months for Atomo to be able to offer more stock, with sales initially limited to the US online market.

Another US-based company, San Francisco startup Compound Foods, is also a year away from launching its own “beanless” coffee, made with a process that has similarities with Atomo’s.

“We started by asking ourselves the question of what coffee is,” says founder Maricel Saenz, a native of coffee-producing Costa Rica. “It’s a plant, but ultimately the product that you consume is made of chemical compounds that have been brewed through water.”

She then looked for those key compounds elsewhere in nature, much like Impossible Foods did to create its famous burgers based on heme, a molecule that “makes meat taste like meat.”

Compound Foods also uses fermentation to recreate coffee, and although Saenz won’t reveal exactly what her equivalents for heme, soy and yeast are, she says they come from sustainable plants that are low in carbon emissions and water use, and are locally sourced.

“We then grow these microbes in controlled settings where we can change different parameters to try and modulate flavours and aromas,” she says. The end products will be a cold brew and a powder, to be used in the same way as ground coffee.

Saenz says that her goal is to create different brews that resemble traditional coffees, drawing inspiration from actual coffee processing methods, such as fermentation. Compound Coffee’s first brew is modelled after the Mocha Java blend, offering “bright acidity, chocolate notes and dry fruit flavours,” she says. Having just received $4.5 million in venture capital funding, Compound Coffee shows there’s appetite for alternative coffee among investors, too. It’s hard though to predict whether these products will be truly sustainable once at scale.

“The environmental advantage would be that you’re not importing coffee from other countries,” says Lynn Frewer, a professor of food and society at Newcastle University. “You would also be less vulnerable to system shocks if there’s a geopolitical change or climate change. The disadvantage is that a lot of people make their living growing coffee, it’s their cash crop. So, in terms of the food system there’s pluses and minuses.”

Societal acceptance is likely to be another issue: “I think coffee has more potential than other products,” says Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of food policy at Dalhousie University in Canada. “People won’t necessarily be thinking that because a coffee is lab-produced or synthetic, the integrity of the product itself is compromised. That’s a concern with lab grown meat, which is perceived as more denaturalised.” Frewer, however, believes there will be variability between consumers, and some will also see lab-grown coffee as unnatural.

On the flip side, making specialty coffee will be easier than ever: “You would certainly have the potential to design whatever taste you want,” says Charlebois. “You could actually design the perfect bean.”

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By combining human cells and mechanical components researchers have created a new kind of hybrid human organ that works as well as the real thing.

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Patients with kidney failure require regular dialysis which is an invasive and potentially risky treatment. But now researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) have successfully demonstrated a hybrid biological-mechanical “bio-artificial” kidney that can be implanted into patients and that works without the need for powerful and often debilitating drugs.

The kidney performs several vital functions in the body, most notably filtering toxins and waste products out of the blood, but also regulating blood pressure, electrolyte concentrations, and other bodily fluids, so when kidneys begin to fail replicating these processes is complicated. Patients often start with dialysis, but this is time consuming and un comfortable.

The Future of Healthcare 2030, by Keynote Matthew Griffin

A longer term fix is a kidney transplant which can restore a higher quality of life but comes with the risky side effect of requiring immune suppressing drugs to prevent organ rejection.

The new kidney though can be implanted into a patient to perform the main functions of the real thing, but without the need for the immune suppressing drugs or blood thinners which are also often needed when patients have kidney transplants.

The new device is made up of two main parts. The hemofilter is made up of silicon semiconductor membranes that remove waste products from blood, and the bioreactor, meanwhile, contains engineered renal tubule cells, which regulate water volume, electrolyte balance, and other metabolic functions. The membranes also protect these cells from being attacked by the patient’s immune system.

How it works

Previous tests had gotten each of these parts working independently, but this is the first time the team has tested them working in tandem in one device.

The bioartificial kidney connects to two major arteries in the patient – one that transports blood to be filtered in, and one that transports filtered blood back into the body – as well as to the bladder, where the waste products are deposited as urine.

The team has now conducted proof of concept experiments, showing that the bioartificial kidney works under blood pressure alone, without the need for pumps or external power sources. The renal tubule cells survived and continued functioning throughout the test.

For their efforts, the UCSF researchers have now been awarded a $650,000 prize from KidneyX, as one of the winners of the Phase 1 Artificial Kidney Prize.

“Our team engineered the artificial kidney to sustainably support a culture of human kidney cells without provoking an immune response,” says Shuvo Roy, lead researcher on the project. “Now that we have demonstrated the feasibility of combining the hemofilter and bioreactor, we can focus on upscaling the technology for more rigorous preclinical testing, and ultimately, clinical trials.”

The team describes the bioartificial kidney in the video above.

Source: UCSF

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

What if your food could vaccinate you against diseases? And other odd questions …

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It’s a hot summers day and you bite down on a plump, chilled orange. Citrus juice explodes in your mouth in a refreshing, tingling burst. Ahh. And congratulations, just like that, you’ve been vaccinated against the latest virus.

That’s one of the goals of molecular farming, a kind of biomanufacturing technology, whose vision to have plants synthesise future medications and vaccines. Using genetic engineering and synthetic biology scientists can introduce brand new biochemical pathways into plant cells – or even whole plants – essentially turning them into single use bioreactors. And if it all sounds farfetched then the technologies to do this are already here, and they’ve been used – in one case to turn chickens into vaccine factories.

The whole idea has a retro-futuristic science fiction vibe. First conceived of in 1986, molecular farming got its boost three decades later, when the FDA approved the first – and only – plant derived therapeutic protein for humans to treat Gaucher disease, a genetic disorder that prevents people from breaking down fats.

But to Drs. Hugues Fausther-Bovendo and Gary Kobinger at Université Laval, Quebec and Galveston National Laboratory, Texas, respectively, we’re just getting started. In a new perspective article published last week in Science, the duo argue that plants have long been an overlooked resource for biomanufacturing.

Plants are cheap to grow and resist common forms of contamination that haunt other drug manufacturing processes, while being sustainable and environmentally friendly. The resulting therapeutic proteins or vaccines are often stored inside their seeds or other plant cell components, which can be easily dehydrated for storage – no ultra-cold freezers or sterile carriers required.

They also work fast. In just three weeks, the Canadian company Medicago produced a plant based candidate Covid-19 vaccine that mimics the outer layer of the virus to stimulate an immune response. The vaccine is now in late stage clinical trials.

Even wilder, plants themselves can be turned into edible medicines. Rather than insulin shots, people with diabetes could just eat a tomato. Instead of getting a flu jab, you could munch on an ear of fresh, sweet corn. The draw of molecular farming encouraged DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to finance three massive facilities to optimise the manufacturing of plant made vaccines. And if we ever make it to Mars plants like these nanobionic plants will be far easier to cultivate than setting up a whole pharmaceutical operation.

“Molecular farming could have a considerable impact on both human and animal health,” the authors said.

Hijacking other lifeforms to make drugs isn’t new. Take the common yeast, a scientist’s favorite medium for genetic engineering and a brewer’s best friend. Using little circular “spaceships” that carry new genes, called vectors, scientist can create brand-new biochemical pathways into these critters.

In one recent study, a Stanford team made 34 modifications to the yeast’s DNA to chemically assemble a molecule with widespread effects on human muscles, glands, and tissue.

Other mediums for synthesising drugs, antibodies, and vaccines have relied on a rainbow of hosts, from the exotic such as insect cells, to the slightly more mundane, such as eggs.

The flu vaccine, for example, is cultured in chicken eggs, which supports the growth of an attenuated version of the virus to help stimulate the immune system. And an upcoming Covid-19 vaccine is doing the same. But if you’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of home brewing gone bad – beer, wine, kombucha, or otherwise – you’ll have a visceral feel of the dangers involved. Although using yeast or mammalian cells for biomanufacturing is the norm today, it’s a costly operation. Cells fill massive, rotating jugs inside strictly controlled facilities. Operations are under constant threat of zoonotic pathogens – dangerous, disease causing bugs that could waste a whole tank.

Using plants as replacement biofactories started with a simple calculation – they’re cheap and easy to grow. Plants only require three things: light, water, and soil. Add in fertiliser if you’re feeling fancy. Greenhouses, if needed, are still far more economical than stainless steel bioreactors.

But scientists soon realized other benefits. One is experience. With thousands of years of collective agricultural know-how under humanity’s belt, it’s relatively easy to gauge the best way to grow an antibody-producing tobacco leaf, antitoxin potato, or herpes vaccine-making soybean. In developing countries, just plant them in the field or on vertical stacks – no special equipment needed. To harvest simply crush the plants and extract the medications from the juice. Or simply freeze dry parts of the plant containing the drug into a powder for storage and shipping. The whole process is economical and sustainable.

Add in the recent boom in gene editing tools, and molecular farming is on a roll. The process is similar to genetically modified (GM) crops. It starts with introducing a vector into the whole plant or plant cells, which carries the genetic code to make a protein or a vaccine. Depending on the type of vector, the new DNA can integrate into the plant’s own genome – something called “stable expression” – or it can float around for just long enough for the plant to carry out its protein making instructions.

The latter, dubbed “transient expression,” is especially tantalising for its rocket speed. It’s possible to extract vaccines and therapeutic proteins within weeks, the authors said.

The other benefit though came as a surprise. Plant produced vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, for example, those used to treat severe Covid-19 cases, are far more potent than similar molecules made in chicken eggs or yeasts. Most vaccines these days require adjuvants, a molecular “sprinkle” on top that helps to further stimulate an immune response.

In plants, however, the resulting vaccine contains a soup of plant biochemicals. These molecules, the authors said, can act similarly to an adjuvant, potentially making vaccine formulations far more simple and affordable.

But with great power comes great responsibility. Overstimulating the immune system can have catastrophic side effects. There’s good news. So far, monoclonal antibodies produced by plants against HIV and Ebola showed very few side effects, with the most common ones being a low fever in three clinical trials.

But perhaps the most tantalising promise of molecular farming in the near future is crops that contain a vaccine or other drug.

If the idea of eating a vaccine grosses you out then there’s precedent. One type of the polio vaccine, which contains a weakened virus given as an edible, was once used widely in wiping out the virus. However, in a six-year span at the turn of the century, a slew of plant-based edible vaccines against Hep B, rabies, and the norovirus became pioneers, and martyrs, of that goal.

“The proportion of immunised individuals who generated an immune response … was disappointingly lower than in clinical trials involving standard vaccines administered,” the authors said.

That’s changing however. With the rise of CRISPR and other precision gene-editing tools, “edible plant-made vaccines could now generate meaningful immune responses.”

Several recent tests tried using a vaccine shot as the first dose, with an edible plant-based vaccine derived from rice, cereals, or corn as a booster.

For now though edible plant-based therapeutics are still in the preclinical development phase. Even when technologically possible, they’ll also likely hit roadblocks and protests. Current animosity towards GMOs may carry over. Costs and protocols for safe manufacturing will have to be in place. But, all that said, molecular farming could also be the great equaliser for therapeutic access, while minimising impact on an increasingly tumultuous climate.

To the authors, the key is to look ahead.

“Manufacturing of pharma­ceutical proteins may remain dominated by current production systems until economic attractiveness … shifts the balance toward molecular farming,” they said.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

The future of food doesn’t involve raising animals for slaughter or growing crops in fields … and it’s arriving.

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Amazon and Ocado are growing crops in vertical farms in warehouses, not open fields, companies are 3D printing beef in space, and elsewhere companies have figured out how to feed the entire planet with just one cell from a single chicken without killing the chicken. They’ve also figured out how to grow food from air, create an unlimited supply of beef, chicken, duck, fish, and steak without killing any animals, and how to create dairy without the cow. As I’ve been saying for years now look at it however you want but the future of food doesn’t involve farms or animals … certainly not in the traditional sense. And thanks to some of these developments you could also soon see ethical T-Rex and Zebra Burgers being sold (seriously).

In yet another breakthrough for what’s known as the Clean Meat industry the company Higher Steaks, based out of Cambridge in the UK, has said it’s managed to produce samples of its first products – delicious bacon strips and pork belly made in a lab from cultivated animal cells which means like the beef, fish, and steaks that came before it, you can now eat bacon without anyone ever having to rear or slaughter a pig ever again.

HS Head of R&D, Ruth Helen Faram & CEO Benjamina Bollag Courtesy: Higher Steaks

“There’s still a lot of work until [our product] is commercial,” said Higher Steaks chief executive Benjamina Bollag, “but the revelation of a pork belly product that’s made from 50% cultivated cells and a bacon product which contains 70% meat grown from a cell material in a laboratory is something of a milestone for the industry.”

The remaining ingredients in Higher Steaks bacon and pork belly are a mixture of plant base, proteins, fats and starches to bind the cellular material together. To achieve this first step on its road to commercialisation, Higher Steaks tapped the expertise of an undisclosed chef to formulate the meat into an approximation of the pork belly and bacon.

At this stage, the pilot was more to show what Higher Steaks can do rather than what the company will do, said Bollag.

“In the future it will be scaffolding,” said Bollag, and what she means by that is that they will be working on the scaffolding that the individual cultured animal cells bind to and then grow on in order to create the meat’s shape and texture. “It’s more showing what our meat can do and what we’re working on. In the future it will be with scaffolding.”

A number of companies, including Tantti Laboratories, Matrix Meats and Prellis Biologics, make the kind of biomaterial nano-scale scaffolding that could be used as a frame on which to grow structures equivalent to the fibrous textures of muscle.

In all, some 30 cell-based meat startups have launched globally since 2014, and that’s now accelerating rapidly as the exponential technology moves to the next phase, and all of them are looking to carve themselves out a slice of the $1.4 trillion meat market.

Meanwhile, demand for pork continues to rise even as supplies have been decimated by an outbreak of African Swine Fever that could have killed as much as 40% of China’s population of pigs in 2019.

“Our mission is to provide meat that is healthy and sustainable without the consumer making any sacrifices on taste,” said Bollag in a statement. “The production of the first ever cultivated bacon and pork belly is proof that new techniques can help meet overwhelming demand for pork products globally.”

Given the highly capitalized competitors that Higher Steaks faces off against, the company is looking for industry partners to help commercialize its technology.

To improve its competitive position, Higher Steaks recently hired Dr. James Clark, the former chief technology officer of PredictImmune.

“I was always quite intrigued by cultured meat production, a mix of both science and food production. In 2013 I watched the first cultured meat burger from Mark Post costing £250,000, cooked on the BBC,” said Clark. “I was approached about joining Higher Steaks earlier this year and was attracted to joining primarily by the science along with the ambition and energy of the Higher Steaks founder Benjamina Bollag . I believe Higher Steaks is a company with a technology to be disruptive in the cultured meat area and at my career stage I was looking for a challenge.”

Brought in to scale the cultivated meat process at Higher Steaks, Clark has led the development of biotech and pharma products at early-stage and publicly traded companies.

“The addition of Dr. James Clark to the team gives Higher Steaks a significant advantage,” said Dr. Ruth Helen Faram, head of R&D. “Cultivated pork belly and bacon have never been demonstrated before and Higher Steaks is the first to develop a prototype containing over 70% cultivated pork muscle, without the use of bovine serum.”

Consumers shouldn’t expect to see Higher Steaks’ pork belly on store shelves or in restaurants anytime soon, Bollag cautioned. “We’re still in the thousands of pounds per kilogram.” Although, as I’ve written about before, there are now plans afoot to get that to below $15 per lb which would start putting the price of these new meats on a par with supermarket prices. And, as for what comes next the company is going to have a tasting event later this year so I’ll be keeping an eye on them.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Creating Soya and other protein products has a huge environmental impact, food literally made from air eliminates that.

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There’s a food revolution going on – whether it’s plant based meat, which let’s face it is just veg, or whether it’s the ability to feed the entire planet by taking just a single cell from a single feather from a single chicken called Ian, or lab made steaks. And now, as though the world of food can’t get any weirder, and following on from another article where I talked about “meat” made from thin air, literally, Finnish scientists from Solar Foods have announced that their protein products made from air will soon be able to compete head to head with traditional Soya on price in under a decade.

The protein in question is produced from soil based bacteria that are fed hydrogen which split from water using electricity, and it’s an old NASA recipe after it was originally designed as a way to create food in space without the need to transport it there first. The researchers say if the electricity comes from solar and wind power, the food can be grown with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions. And, if their dreams are realised it could help the world tackle many of the problems associated with farming.

An introduction to Solar Foods

So far the company has attracted over 5.5m euros of investment, and they predict, depending on the price of electricity which is rapidly dropping to zero with advances in renewable energy, especially solar power, that their costs will roughly match those for soya production by the end of the decade – perhaps even by 2025.

The precious protein flour, which is called Solein, tastes of nothing, which is what the scientists have planned, and they want it to be used as a neutral additive to all sorts of foods.

For example, it could mimic palm oil by reinforcing pies, ice cream, biscuits, pasta, noodles, sauces or bread, and much more, and their inventors say it can be also used as a medium for growing cultured meat or fish. It could also be used to feed cattle to save them eating soya raised on rainforest land.

However, even if things go according to plan, which, of course they may not, it will likely be many years before the protein production can be scaled up enough to meet global demand, but that said, once the product quality and the costs are right then all that’s left to solve is the issue of manufacturing and that’s arguably not too hard a feat to overcome – especially when you consider the sci-fi like nature of being able to literally create food from thin air.

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