The world population, approaching 7.8 billion people, is estimated to increase to almost 9.2 billion by 2035, break through 10 billion by 2060 and edge towards 11 billion by 2100, according to the United Nations’ World Population Prospectus 2019. The good news is that this means a slowdown is expected. The bad news is that the growth is not expected to happen at the same rate everywhere. Africa will be the continent to face phenomenal challenges: it is expected to add some 3 billion people to its current population of 1.3 billion.
These are projections, of course, but they throw up a wide range of socio-political, economic and demographic challenges globally and for Africa in particular. One of the most significant challenges will be how to feed everyone.
A possible solution? Lab-grown meat.
Illtud Dunsford, co-founder and chief executive of Cellular Agriculture, a spinout of University of Bath in the southwest of the UK, is one of the driving forces behind cultured meat. His company’s ambition is “to feed a growing population,” he told Global University Venturing.
If you have not yet heard of the spinout, it is because Cellular Agriculture is not interested in launching an expensive consumer product just to have something on the market. Instead, the spinout is playing the long game and developing the underlying technology that lab-grown meat developers will eventually require.
Dunsford said: “The reason why we are doing this is population growth and food poverty. The key challenge for us is to get the technology to the scale where we can do that. It does not have to be purely through large-scale factories and how we currently think of food production. It also means novel applications on a smaller scale.”
Above: Scott Allan observes the prototype large-scale bioreactor
The spinout builds on the tissue engineering expertise of co-founder Marianne Ellis, senior lecturer in chemical engineering and head of department. Ellis already has a more mature spinout, Cellesce, which has developed a process to grow organoids – small versions of organs – and tumours to test cancer drugs on a more realistic model than a flat layer of cells. Cellesce’s technology automates the generation of organoids – previously a difficult, manual process – and reduces batch-to-batch variability.
If the leap from tumours to burgers seems just a bit too far, Ellis pointed out that Cellesce meant she already knew how to take tissue engineering to a commercial place. And in fact, the leap was not all that far.
Ellis has been fascinated by the space since her PhD, which focused on bone tissue engineering and how to “repair bones by growing cells and making a material called a scaffold,” she said.
“The scaffold is needed because cells need to attach to something to grow. Collagen is probably the material that most people have heard of,” Ellis said. The material could be something other than collagen, she added, and the spinout had not yet figured out which material was the best from a carbon footprint-perspective, for example, or whether a nationally abundant resource such as grass would be suitable.
The scaffold structure, called hollow fibre membrane, was “biodegradable and would, once in contact with water, degrade”. Ellis clarified: “Hollow fibres have been around for a long time,” having originally been developed in the 1960s for water purification.
Cellular Agriculture figured out how to use the hollow fibre membranes in a tubular container called a bioreactor, which, in theory, offered the highest cell density. Ellis described it as “a bundle of drinking straws thinner than a millimetre in diameter and porous – a design that replicates blood vessel structure.
“As the blood goes through the capillary, what the cells need will pass across the walls of the capillary to the cells on the outside and any waste material comes back into the blood vessels. This system, which was essentially my PhD thesis, is called pseudo-vascularisation, because it is vascularisation but they are not real blood vessels. By doing that, you get a lot of cells in a small space.”
Current tissue engineering technology largely relies on stirred-tank reactors – a bucket-like container with an impeller and a stirrer where cells are on full particles rather than a hollow fibre. Stirred-tank reactors are cheap and can be purchased off the shelf, but they take up a lot of space.
Space has never been an issue for stirred-tank reactors, because they have been used for applications such as cell therapy and regenerative medicine. But now that the systems are being used to grow meat in a lab to feed billions of people, that scale is quickly becoming an issue.
Scott Allan, a PhD student supervised by Ellis and Dunsford, and a research fellow with cellular agriculture research institute New Harvest, specified: “Stirred-tank reactors are typically operated in batch: you put all the cells and the media in, close it up and it stirs it all.”
The problem was that “everything is contained,” Allan said. “All the by-products, such as lactate, stay in there and some point, they reach a concentration that is too high for the cells to stay alive in. Whereas in our system, we remove the waste as it is produced.”
Cellular Agriculture’s system had its challenges, too, Ellis admitted. “They are more complicated to set up and they are harder to process, but it is a balance then of the efficiencies with the space and the media.”
Dunsford added: “These are engineering considerations of scale, which is very different in terms of funding. We are not looking at the early market, which is the easiest because you could just buy stirred-tank reactors on eBay.”
Ellis agreed: “One of the things we need to do to achieve price parity with cheaper cuts of meat is to grow as many cells in a small a space as possible using as few raw materials as possible.”
The challenge and leap in technology was comparable to going from computers that took up entire floors and required a whole team to operate to having a smartphone that was vastly more powerful. Ellis continued: “We are talking probably 100 to 200 times more space efficient, and that also translates into labour efficiency and the amount of people that you need to set up, look after them and take down the systems. It is not just space gains; it is a lot of additional gains.”
Above: Marianne Ellis
The efficiency gain was equivalent to producing 300 kilograms using Cellular Agriculture’s technology at the same size that the stirred-tank reactor produced only 10 kilograms, Allan said.
Such a task might sound aspirational, but Ellis pointed out that “it is not impossible, fortunately. We work with input from biologists to figure out what to replicate through the physical environment that we design or through adding supplements.
“It is a different challenge to organoids. Some aspects are easier, some harder. Arguably the hardest problem is producing something low-cost when everything that has happened before in tissue engineering has been for very high-value products. Medical applications do not have to cost $1 per unit – although we will get there eventually: just look at penicillin.”
Above: Iterations of Cellular Agriculture’s bioreactor, starting with part of a kidney dialysis machine at the top
A considerable amount of work was about managing expectations, Ellis added, because “people think lab-grown meat is going to be next to bags of Quorn in a few years, but we are probably talking more than five years.”
As substantial as Ellis’ expertise is in tissue engineering, as important is Dunsford’s knowledge of the food industry. Dunsford’s family can trace their agricultural history back more than three centuries and after he first pursued a career in the creative industries, he went back to the farm and launched specialty meat processing firm Charcutier in 2011. The company became a supplier to luxury department store Fortnum & Mason, opened a stall in London’s famous Borough Market and in 2016 won the BBC Food and Farming Award for Best Food Producer in the UK.
But it was the Nuffield Farming Scholarship that led Dunsford to the Symposium for Cultured Meat at Maastricht University, where he met Ellis and they decided to get into business together.
Three years without raising substantial equity financing in a space that has the potential to have a phenomenal impact might raise eyebrows, but Dunsford explained: “We are very realistic in how much research needs to be done and so we are taking a much more traditional view, especially – even though it is a small amount – having had investment from the likes of Innovate UK.
“We are still looking for those types of funding streams rather than necessarily looking for big chunks of equity. Some of the pioneers have already given so much away in their companies that it really puts pressure on them to find an exit now. Whereas for us, there’s empirical science that needs to be done to establish this as an industry.”
Ellis added: “We have seen Just has launched their, albeit quite expensive, chicken nuggets and Mosa Meat, about a year ago, was saying it would be five years until they would have something on the market. Mosa Meat is very sound in terms of its technical development. It is a massive company but it maintained links with Maastricht University –it is a spinout – so five years is a fair timeline.”
Extract from the GUV December issue
