Let’s solve meat!
Traditional meat is causing a host of environmental problems: methane emissions, land use change, biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance, eutrophication, etc.
One of the alternatives is cultivated meat, where stem cells are isolated from an animal, to be cultivated in a bioreactor filled with growth medium.
After multiplication, the cells can be harvested and processed into meat products with the same taste and nutrition, but without the animal suffering and with a much lower footprint. Or hoofprint.
As for all food products, price parity between the sustainable alternative and the traditional product is crucial. Bluntly: a cultivated burger must be as cheap as a regular burger, or it’s never going to go big.
The growth medium contains all the nutrients for the cells to grow and thrive. But what really sends the cost skyrocketing, are tiny amounts of recombinant proteins and growth factors, that basically explain the cells how to replicate and form tissues.
These molecules, such as insulin, transferrin, IGF1, FGF2, and EGF, represent up to 85% of the cost of growth medium. By mass-producing these biomolecules in insect-bioconversion facilities, we can cut their cost by 95%, and blast through this bottleneck.
