Launch HN: Micro Meat (YC S21) – Technology for scaling cultivated meat

[asmertgen]

Hi HN community, Anne-Sophie and Vincent here, the founders of Micro Meat. We’ve developed new techniques for producing cultivated meat.

Cultivated meat is just real meat based on animal cells, but instead of getting meat by growing animals, it is grown in bioreactors. This will soon be much better for our planet: less land, water and feed required for the animals, less environmental impact from cutting down forests for farmland and feed production, less antibiotics, and of course, far less harm to animals.

The basic process for cultivating meat is known, but there remain difficult problems in bringing it to mass production. I’ll describe the process, the problems, and our solution.

Cultivating meat is similar to brewing beer, but instead of growing yeast, we grow muscle cells (plus fat cells for deliciousness!). The process begins with a handful of stem cells that are isolated from an animal. Initially, the volume is tiny and the cells are handled very carefully. They are mixed with medium, which is a mixture of growth factors like insulin, along with amino acids, and other nutrients that they need to grow. Then they are proliferated (multiplied) to upwards of 10M cells per mL.

After proliferating, the overall volume gets above 250 mL and shear stresses start to become an issue, meaning the cells get damaged and break apart. Traditional bioreactors use large impellers for mixing the cells and medium, along with a sparger which adds gasses like CO2 and O2. The impeller, gas bubbles, baffles, and internal surfaces are all locations where cells encounter damaging shear stresses. That’s not a problem if you’re cultivating bacteria, yeast, or other microorganisms that have a high tolerance for this. But mammal, bird and fish cells are very intolerant of such stresses, making it hard to cultivate meat. This is the first problem we address.

After the cells have proliferated from a very small volume to tens or hundreds of liters, they are still a mass of single, unorganized cells. In order to get delicious meat we need to make those individual cells merge and differentiate together to form actual muscle tissue that has the right texture. When cells differentiate, they change from being stem cells, into specialized cells and structures, for example, inside the cells myosin heavy chains develop along the actin cell-skeleton. These myosin-actin complexes are basically the motors of the muscle. For this, the cells get seeded onto constructs called scaffolds. A scaffold is like housing for the cells, a structure where cells can easily move into and grow. We usually try to make scaffolds that mimic the cells' natural environment in the animal's body so they feel as at home as possible.

Traditional methods pour the proliferated cells on top of the scaffold and hope that they “stick”. This is easy, but results in tissues that aren’t uniform—in some places the cells attach well, in other places not at all. Additionally, the scaffolds are not always edible—a major problem if you’re producing meat! Consistent cell distribution throughout the scaffold is the second problem we address, and edibility is the third.

The scaffolds are then reintroduced to reactors for another proliferation or differentiation, depending on the process. The cells are given time to mature, where they finalize their structure, orientation and internal make-up. At this point, you have muscle tissue, and the only thing left to add is components such as fat, which add to the taste and texture of the meat.

This process is immensely complex and the cost to produce it at scale is tremendous. To bring cultivated meat to the masses, the complexity and cost problems have to be solved. Many companies have spent years on R&D, but are still not able to produce at larger scales. We want to change that.

We asked ourselves, how could we protect these cells while they are in the harsh environment of the reactor, while also creating homogenous, high quality 3D scaffolds that are consistent throughout?

Our method addresses shear stress by shielding the cells within the scaffold. Because the cells are embedded inside the scaffold they don’t feel the damaging wall shear stresses inside a bioreactor, only the surface of the scaffold itself is exposed to them. Our scaffold composition is designed to maintain typical diffusion properties, so even though the cells are shielded and don’t touch the medium (which contains the nutrients) the nutrients still make it to the cells. As time goes on and the cells differentiate and mature, they now have a 3D construct where they can begin to develop into the texture of meat. This process enables cells to be seeded at nearly any rate, from only a few grams per minute to over thousands of kilograms per minute. This means our technology can be used from the research stage all the way through full production.

We don’t intend to sell meat ourselves. Our business aims at helping other companies to go to market faster, by eliminating the complexity associated with scaffold seeding. Our scaffolding technology easily integrates into any bioreactor train on the market. Users can purchase or lease the machine for around $250-$500, depending on their needs. Our scaffold bio-inks are universal for mammals, birds and fish, and can be purchased either as single orders or as a subscription, ranging from volumes of one liter up to thousands. Each liter of scaffold costs less than $2 and produces 2 to 5 kilograms of meat.

A word on our backgrounds: I (Anne-Sophie) am a biomedical and tissue engineer with a PhD from ETH Zurich and Masters from Imperial College London. I’ve been working on creating functional biological tissues in the lab most of my professional career. I love animals and have been a vegetarian since I was 8 years old. I also love our planet and decided to use my tissue engineering skills to help change our food system. And I love good food! so the idea of amazing new food products is highly appealing to me.

I (Vincent) am a space systems engineer. I’ve been building, testing, launching and analyzing the Delta IV, Atlas V, New Glenn and SLS rockets for the last 7 years. I’ve probably had my hands in almost every stage of launch system development, from napkin sketches to saying go for launch. Space has always been awe-inspiring to me, but the climate crisis needs direct attention in order to stop, reverse and survive the impacts of climate change. After researching the impact the livestock industry has on our planet, I knew I wanted to get involved to stop it.

If you’re interested in learning more or collaborating, you’re warmly welcome to reach out to us at [e-mail]. We’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the above, from cultivated meat in general to the details of the production process, and whatever else you’d like to ask or share!

[Nathanael_M]

Wow, I have so many questions. First, I really respect people acting on conviction. Anyway, I have lots of questions (all completely uninformed) so feel free to ignore any of them, haha.

1) Where are you in the development process? Have your scaffolds been used to successfully grow a piece of edible meat?

2) When do you think the value of cultivated meat will grow to a point to make the industry self-sustaining? Or even just for it to become a viable option for restaurants/consumers?

3) How is flavour added in the process? Since diet has so much impact on flavour, how can you experiment with flavour while growing it in lab? I understand this is specific to another step in the process, so if you can't answer, no worries.

4) When you say scaffolding, my mind immediately goes to a very visual/physically defined place. I'm picturing like a Ribeye Exoskeleton. What level of control over the sculpting of the end product do you have, or does the scaffolding function on a very general growth support level that results in the development of an end product that is then sculpted by the meat-maker?

5) Anne-Sophie, have you tried any lab grown meat?

6) How far away are we from seeing "at-home" kits for meat growing? I'm picturing a world where a restaurant has their meat-printer going all the time, experimenting with different flavours and textures for the next menu!

7) Does this have any non-edible use cases? Can this process be applied to growing functional muscle/tissue, not just edible muscle/tissue?

Thanks! Again, feel free to pick and choose.

[vpribble]

1) We have already created our first piece of edible pork using our method!

2) ATKearney in their article "How will cultured meat and meat alternatives disrupt the agricultural and food industry?" estimates that about 10% of global meat consumption could be switched over to cultivated meat around 2030. While 10% is low, I think you'll start seeing restaurant experiences start cropping up more and more over the next 3-7 years.

3) For cultivated meat, one method of adding flavor is by cultivating fat cells and merging it with the muscle cells after maturing.

4) With our method, the final shape of the meat can actually get very unique. There really are no limitations on the shape/ layout of the meat, and the final shaping is done after maturing the cells. If you want to have chicken meat in the shape of a ribeye, you will definitely be able to with our technology.

5) We have not tasted it yet, but we will very soon!

6) We are probably closer than you might imagine. Our technology enables production at any scale, from a full industrial plant to a small "home brewing" set-up. Really, it just comes down to getting the medium and growth factors to be cheaper for the average consumer.

7) Generally yes, with some minor and not so minor adaptations.

[rolleiflex]

Just wanted to say this is probably the best launch HN description I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been here for the better part of the decade. Thank you for going into the real meat (ahem) of it and not being scared of writing at length.

Your cause, if successful, will hopefully indirectly result in orders of magnitude reduction in total animal suffering, so best of luck and godspeed.

[notahacker]

Agreed, it was a particularly well-written description and if the end products manufactured with it reached the right taste/price, they're something I'd eat regularly

[asmertgen]

Thank you so much! Highly appreciated!

[coldpie]

As a meat fan, and also an Earth fan, this is something I've always wanted to see happen. I've mostly fallen on the Earth side of the fence, which means I've been vegetarian-ish for years. I would love to be able to eat what I want without the climate guilt. Glad to see this tech is getting closer towards market, and I hope your business is successful.

[Ratalala]

Same here. I dropped meat more because of being a "billions of living creatures living miserable, short lives before being slaughtered" anti-fan, but the GHG impacts are a nice side effect. Damn do I miss meat, though.

[asmertgen]

Great to hear you are excited about this!

[satvikpendem]

To those wondering why lab-grown meat instead of going vegan:

People are driven by incentives. People like meat, so instead of asking them to stop eating meat, which most won't do, make it a better option that fits with whatever the asker's goals are. In this case, you'd want people to care about animals or decrease environmental effects, so the way to do that while also considering people's incentives of loving meat is to have lab grown meat, or something close enough like plant-based meat substitutes that taste like meat.

You will never get anything done by appealing to individuals to change their habits wholesale, that's just not going to happen, people are too entrenched in their defaults. You have to appeal to people's wants and desires and bend them towards your own goals. Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat (and now Micro Meat, etc) have got it spot on: economically target the incentives of wanting to eat meat but make them out of non-sentient substances like plants or bacteria growing muscle cells.

That people still consider that everyone will go vegan or stop eating meat altogether is a fantastical view of the world, it has no basis in true reality. There will be more people contributing towards the lessening of the suffering of animals in the next few years via eating these non-sentient substitutes than has ever been achieved in the last century of the modern vegan movement, simply because it seems now finally that larger human incentives are being targeted directly, which is much likelier to effect change than individualistic pandering.

[armchairhacker]

It’s even simpler than that.

There are some people who simply don’t function as well when they don’t eat meat. “But I’m vegan and I do just fine, in fact it I feel better then when I was eating meat”. I don’t doubt you, but I also don’t doubt the ex-vegans who tried and tried, but just felt awful and tired until they reintroduced meat. Different people have different metabolisms, and some people just can’t properly digest certain foods for some reason.

Meat has a much higher concentration of protein and iron than vegan food. Even foods like tofu and seitan (sold refrigerated at grocery stores) are only 50% protein while chicken breast is around 90% and lean fish is almost 100%. The only vegan alternatives which do have a comparable ratio (protein powder, TVP) are basically pure protein extracted from vegetables, the quality and bioavailability doesn’t compare (apparently the human body is bad at absorbing pure nutrients vs. “natural” food that contains them). Many ex-vegans have been consistently anemic, even while taking iron supplements, until they re-introduced meat.

[exdsq]

I wonder if there will be a category between vegetarian and vegan where it consists of vegan & lab-grown, so no animal is that impacted (it's my understanding lab grown is far better than current practices in the dairy industry, for example).

[asmertgen]

Thank you for this! Totally agree!

[mikro2nd]

!meat != vegan

[Thebroser]

Hey! Bioengineering background here, how do you all embed the cells within the scaffold? Is your approach similar to other bioprinting approaches (initial cells seeded via extrusion, inkjet, or laser assisted deposition)? At first I would think this could be done with some sort of printable collagen scaffold but I'm curious for what your approach would be. In addition, as someone that is involved in therapeutics, I'm not too well versed in this space but was curious hearing from your perspective: How close would you say we are to being able to use FBS free media to culture meat at scale?

[asmertgen]

Very good questions there! 1) Yes, our process is similar to bioprinting but it is much more scalable than typical bioprinting. Because this is our proprietary tech I can't say much more than that at this point:) 2) We are currently still using some gelatin in our scaffold which is animal derived but of course we are putting a lot of effort into making it completely animal free asap. 3) There are companies who are focusing on the replacement of FBS and they are moving into relatively scaled processes now. So I would say we are close! Let us know if you have any follow up questions :)

[partisan]

“Fetal bovine serum (FBS) is a ubiquitously used essential supplement in cell culture media. However, there are serious scientific and ethical concerns about the use of FBS regarding its harvest and production.”

From an abstract of a research paper regarding FBS-free media.

[tambourine_man]

Interesting stuff!

I've read that contamination is a huge issue, essentially, bacteria grows much better and faster at the substrate than mammalian cells. So, how do you avoid inadvertently cultivating smelly plaques instead of delicious meat?

Or is that not really an issue and I'm misinformed?

Best of luck. We really need it.

[vpribble]

Contamination is definitely a problem for cultivated meat. It is one of the leading risks when scaling because if the reactor is contaminated at all, you could lose entire batches of meat, and as you can imagine, this is a huge cost hit. To avoid this, cultivated meat is grown in sterile, clean environments. The same kind of equipment you'd find in a hospital (autoclaves) is used to sterilize the equipment common in cultivated meat. There are two basic ideas for preventing contamination. One is to use single use bioreactors, which are sterile after manufacturing. This is extremely common in the biopharma industry, and is preferred because it doesn't require complex cleaning systems. Of course, anything that is single use ends up in a landfill, so thats part of the trade off as well. The other option is to use reusable bioreactors. These require a steam clean after each batch, which adds to the overall operational and build costs of the reactor. This can also generate waste products which have to be handled. Maintaining cleanliness is a challenge, but with proper laboratory practices, and the right kind of bioreactor, contamination should be less of a problem.

[Jorge1o1]

One of the most popular articles on HN with a whopping 900+ comments was about exactly this issue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288

According to Paul Wood, the threat of bacterial contamination makes cultivated meat extremely expensive and un-cost-competitive.

[monkeycantype]

As I understand it your technology is in part about providing a scaffolding that enables normal animal cells to grow. But there's a question that I genuinely think is important, but risk sounding like a troll. The qualities of a successful cancerous cell, to grow without restraint, unimpeded by the density of other cells or whether the cell is attached to a surface, will probably be even more successful in a bio-reactor than they would be in an organism where unconstrained growth will undermine the health of the the animal and the supply of energy and nutrients to the cell. This leads me to wonder whether cells with cancer like qualities - deranged karyotypes and unregulated cell division will become common in meat cell cultures. Does this seem reasonable? Is it a health issue, or do we perhaps not know yet? It's certainly a bit creepy.

[WinterMount223]

Some thoughts. Tumors in muscular tissue are relatively rare. The growth cycle in these bioreactors should be short, giving less probability of runaway mutations. It’s a hyper growth medium with supernatural levels of growth hormones, so tumors may actually be favored. Are tumoral mammal cells integrated by humans when infested raw?

[cphoover]

a tumor burger? doesnt sound very appetizing.

[second--shift]

This is very interesting from a society/technology perspective. I support your efforts! I do have one or two fundamental questions about this industry/space, not necessarily related to this company, but this might be a good place to ask.

I am a vegan of about 10 years now, and as (potentially) a constituent of the addressable market, here's why I'm not going to buy lab-grown "meat": my primary motivations for dietary veganism are to do with non-renewable resource consumption: potable water, land use, oil/energy, emissions, etc. Traditional industrial meat consumption uses around 10x land/energy/ghg emissions as plant crops per calorie, and about 100x the water (or more). It's not clear to me how the lab-grown meat addresses these resource consumption considerations.

---

> Cultivating meat is similar to brewing beer

As a dietary vegan I don't know the first thing about meat, but I do know a little about home-brewing. In the case of home-brewing wine or beer, at least for me, it's about ~5x volume in water consumption (~5L of water makes 1L wine), including cleaning, mixing, etc. This is on a tiny scale; I'm sure if water consumption was optimized for you could do even less. Is cultivating lab meat closer in water use to brewing beer, or traditional meat farming? I'm also curious about the energy input; how many calories of energy in -> calories out?

If there are order-of-magnitude gains to be made in non-renewable resource consumption, I can get behind this even if I personally find it a little gross (sorry). At a small scale, I don't doubt the resource consumption is non-optimal, but how much can be gained by scale/optimization?

[jfengel]

I think of lab-grown meat as harm reduction. It will almost certainly be more resource-intensive than a vegan diet, but less so than raising an entire animal for the fraction that becomes edible.

It will also produce less waste, or at least better-controlled waste, than raising an entire animal. But again, more than a purely plant-based diet.

I can't give you numbers, but really, I can't see any reason for you to switch away from a vegan diet if you're satisfied with it. However, a lot of other people will switch from an animal-based diet to one that is somewhat more responsible and causes considerably less pain and suffering.

All meat eaters live with a certain cognitive dissonance on that, which most simply ignore because they consider plant-based diets insufficient. And as a vegan you know that a healthy plant-based diet isn't always easy -- though made a little easier recently by some highly processed products that aren't really all that much better for health or the environment.

[triyambakam]

> dietary vegan

Plant based is probably the most common term for what you're trying to describe. Veganism is the ethical position.

[earlyriser]

You can check this chart comparing Meat/Lab meat/Plant based protein https://agronomics.im/benefits-of-cultivated-meat/ environmental impact

[buzzy_hacker]

Congratulations on the launch, I genuinely think this ranks among the most positive high-impact work one could be doing right now. The scale of animal cruelty is tremendous. Disrupting the meat industry is so important. Do let us know if you need any software engineers!

[asmertgen]

Thank you so much! We are extremely passionate about this and its great to see so much support here! Even though software engineering is not something we need right away we are very happy to connect with passionate people for future opportunities! You can drop us an email if you want to stay in touch!

[kieckerjan]

Impressive initiative. I understand too little of this matter to judge the merits of your approach. However, it is clear to me that if cultivated meat achieves feature parity with "regular" meat and becomes cheaper to produce, it will be the biggest revolution in food since the invention of agriculture, and a possible world saver. Thank you for trying! :-)

[asmertgen]

Exactly that's what is driving us! Thank you for your comment!

[cosgrove]

I'm currently on sabbatical, and I'm thinking about changing careers away from cybersecurity sales engineering and towards a career with cultivated meat. I have no biology background. Vincent, how did you prepare for this endeavor? Did you go back to school? If so, at what level and for how long?

I would relish the chance to dive into a new technical field using my existing sales skills with tons of new on-the-job training, but it feels like too much hubris on my side to go without any schooling background. Help me connect the dots, please?

[blondie9x]

@asmertgen thoughts on this research https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca... ?

[shafyy]

This is a very good article. I place lab-grown in the same mind bucket as carbon capturing. Both are futuristic technologies that don't exist today (not really) but get a lot of media hype. For both, there's a much easier solution that exists today (e.g, switching to renewable energies, switching to plant-based meats) that are great and are also gaining a lot of traction. With both tech, it's unclear if they will ever work at scale. For both cases, it's now more important than ever that we reduce emissions today, and not hope for a maybe technofix in the future.

I don't mean to dunk on your research and proprietary tech. I'm just often pissed to see that these kind of tech is completely overblown and overhyped in the mainstream and media. The worst part is, it gives people an excuse to not change their behavior today: "I'll switch to lab-grown meat when they sell", "I won't cut back on flying, doesn't matter since they will recapture that carbon anyways very soon".

[asmertgen]

Great question. We had this discussion internally quite a lot. Since my co-founder comes from launching rockets let me use this analogy: 20 years ago Elon Musk was though to be crazy when he wanted to build reusable rockets. But now it works. It took a lot of smart minds, effort and money. But they did it. We believe it will be the same with cultivated meat. Completely changing a system, in our case food system, is always a risk and a bit crazy. We agree that the hype is not great. We don't want to make to bold promises. But we do want to change something and we will work hard to make our part to change a system.

[telotortium]

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288

[idealmedtech]

Hi Anne-Sophie and Vincent, excellent post and congratulations on the launch! My main question is about the growth factors; I've heard that there's a few compounds used in these processes that really don't scale, fetal bovine serum being the biggest one right now. Do you have novel approaches to creating this? How will this scale in the future?

Thanks, best of luck!

[vpribble]

Thank you! For the growth factors, we do not have any plans currently for producing them in-house, however there are several companies within the industry (Future Fields for example) that are making great progress in developing animal-free growth factors. Right now, using precision fermentation seems to be the preferred method of production. This is essentially beer brewing but the yeast is modified to produce a certain protein/ growth factor. Since this process is yeast based, it should scale fairly well, as yeast is resistant to the stresses found inside the fermenters.

[ReadEvalPost]

Harm is done to the ecosystem when we concentrate cows in one place and feed them chemically fortified slurry. When cows are allowed to graze pastures, they instead have a positive effect on the local ecosystem.

As such, I am extremely skeptical that the right way forward is to reduce and concentrate the essence of a cow into bioreactors and feed them chemically fortified slurry.

[jallen_dot_dev]

I don't think bioreactors produce giant lakes of shit[1], so from an ecological standpoint this will be an absolute win.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayGJ1YSfDXs&t=36s

[d15s]

Excited for what's to come, best of success in your endeavor.

Looking at the comments they're a good insight into the challenges of what you're aiming to do. Don't get distracted by the criticism, you're solving for it.

"Just become vegan/vegetarian, don't waste your time creating new meat". If our civilization has the resources and talent to make what you're doing happen, then why not? It'll definitely help someone somewhere. Also, this could potentially have future applications in the biomedical industry. We should embrace tech R&D.

"The processes are currently expensive or use non-scalable elements (food/FBS)". Of course, this has to be solved. One step at a time, besides they're not the only startup working on an area of the cultivated meat value-chain.

[ultrasounder]

As a born vegetarian(Religious reasons), I wholeheartedly support this project. I am going to be secretly following your progress and cheering for you. Godspeed.

[asmertgen]

Thank you!

[desireco42]

Hey, excuse my ignorance. How difficult is to procure food you use to grow cells? You mentioned insulin and such.

Can you comment on how "green" are those materials?

[vpribble]

Great question! So the basic medium composition itself is fairly simple, but the growth factors can be difficult to make. There are many places along the supply chain that are strained due to recent events. Because of this, procuring the food is somewhat difficult, but should become easier in the future. Many companies within cultivated meat (such as Heuros, Multus, Future Fields) are also working on animal-free growth factors by using precision fermentation. Precision fermentation is essentially beer brewing, but the yeast is genetically modified to produce a certain growth factor. As for being green, the industry is trending towards trying to find ways to utilize plants as much as possible across production phases. Eventually, besides the initial cells, most cultivated meat production could rely on common plants for the nutrients and growth factors for the cells. This could drastically decrease overall emissions, and even make the products carbon-negative.

[thecolorblue]

I have also worked with bioreactors. Sounds like you have made some great progress. Just a couple thoughts:

1) there are plenty of other niches for microbe production that could possibly use the same technology. I am not suggesting you switch now, but something to keep in mind for the future. In my opinion, the current standard processes for working with bioreactors are slow and manual. I think there is a lot of room for efficiency improvements but it is rarely worth it for individual companies to make those investments.

2) Is all of the growth happening in a single bioreactor or do you have multiple sized bioreactors for different stages? I don't have a scientific background and I'm trying to understand the standard practices better.

edit: fixed typos.

[vpribble]

We definitely agree with you that the reactors currently used in biopharma were not really meant for the level of production required to scale cultivated meat. As for the growth, typically you'll find what's called a "seed train" for growing cultivated meat. This is basically a series of reactors starting from a small flask around 10 mL and ending in a reactor greater than 20000L! The train might have reactors along the way, 10mL, 200mL, 4L, 80L, etc. until the final reactor volume is reached. Some of these reactors, especially the larger reactors near the end of the process, are meant to handle the cells at a specific stage in the lifecycle, such as maturing, where the cells grow in volume.

[ada1981]

Can you share more about your ideas?

[open-source-ux]

I applaud your attempts to tackle such a big issue. I'm a meat eater but the sheer number of animals killed to satisfy our appetite for meat is pretty shocking.

My question is about nutrition and taste: does cultivated meat contain the same nutrition as animal meat?

For example, farm animals may be pasture-fed and reared outside. The meat will probably be expensive but of excellent quality. Or the farm animals may be reared in a industrial-scale farming process that produces cheap supermarket meat (i.e. what many of us buy and eat in the Western World). Given the nutrition and taste profile of these animals is different, how do you cultivate the meat to taste excellent and contain good nutrition? Thank you.

[dehrmann]

Are you looking at how you make the scaffolds and making sure they're potentially vegan? A lot of vegetarians and vegans will be curious about lab-grown meat, but would be turned off if something like collagen was used as part of the scaffold.

[vpribble]

Yes, we are in the process of finalizing our animal-free scaffold composition.

[tonmoy]

Can you comment on the total carbon emission compared to traditional method of producing beef? Assuming you can use completely renewable sources for all the electricity needs, how much more carbon is emitted per kg meat produced?

[vpribble]

Good Food Institute has a great write-up on the reduction of emissions and land use which can be found here (https://gfi.org/blog/cultivated-meat-lca-tea/). To summarize it, with renewables along the production chain, estimates for the reduction of greenhouse emissions/land use for chicken, pork and beef are 17%/63%, 52%/72%, and up to 92%/95% respectively.

[allisdust]

May be not specific to your technology but a general question i have is how are the tissues and cells protected from bacteria? Does the growth medium contain antibiotics? If so, how is the final product separated from it.

[strainer]

I think this is liable to be an extremely confounding aspect of the venture - that meat naturally grows in the context of a living animals immune system which interfaces with the wider microbial reality. Diverse diseases arise and wane through extremely ancient dynamics which we are not close to having full knowledge or command over. I could not trust commercially driven scientific assurances from the present age, that food of all things can be mass produced safely in such a biologically novel scheme. It is not so long ago since all where shocked by the novel generation and danger of Prions in the food chain, some years later that "Junk DNA" is not in fact Junk, etc...

While some risk of strange new disease would still be chanced - it would be orders of magnitude less extreme if this cell cloning technology concentrated in early days, on mass producing leathers and furs, rather than the very matter we put into our living bodies.

[asmertgen]

In research often antibiotics are added to avoid contamination from handling etc. However, large scale and automated production processes can be run antibiotic free because of their very controlled sterile environment. Then the product would also be antibiotic free.

[MrMan]

its easy just add antibiotics to the slurry

[toomuchtodo]

Awesome to see a pivot to climate tech by folks deeply skilled and driven in the space. Thank you for your efforts!

[Terry_Roll]

> Traditional methods pour the proliferated cells on top of the scaffold and hope that they “stick”. This is easy, but results in tissues that aren’t uniform—in some places the cells attach well,

I watched a program where they were using this method to build a heart and appeared to be reasonably successful, but it is pot luck hoping some cells stick.

I guess getting cells to stick is one of the problems not cracked yet, so I wonder how stem cells know when to stick to an organ. I cant help but wonder if the cell sensing and signalling still has some secrets to give up.

> by shielding the cells within the scaffold. Novel.

My only concern with lab grown meat is will it contain enough nutrition? We see supermarkets and farmers interested in growing meat as quickly as possible so it doesnt contain the same nutrition, arguably less nutrition, than organically grown food from the 70's. For example, bacon (pig meat) contains less pantothenic acid as it helps to marbleise the meat but the animal will end up with fatty liver, and fat around the organs instead of under the skin. This then feeds into us, so some of the health complaints humans see are a result of how the food is grown (vegetable or animal). Here in the UK I've seen a suggestion that if everyone went vegetarian, we could free up 80% of the farmland.

I also know that supplements like Histidine will reduce red meat consumption, because dark meats are a source of histadine the precursor for histamine which helps white blood cells move through tissue. So I wonder if some of these supplements will end up in the lab grown meat?

[dyeje]

One thing that really interests me about cultivated meat is the potential for designer cuts that would be otherwise impossible (e.g. wagyu level marbled chicken, a beef ribeye with swirls of pork intermixed, etc). Specifically, I'm thinking of fine dining applications. Do you forsee these kinds of applications coming to life eventually, or am I misunderstanding the capability of the technology?

[adewinter]

Hello and congratulations on launching!

1) It sounds like the scaffold+medium+environment is meant to replace a vascular network. Have you considered growing a vascular system in/around the muscle tissue (if that's possible)?

2) Assuming you get to bulk samples, are there any plans to "exercise" the muscle tissue (e.g. with electric stimulation) to reach a desired tenderness/texture?

3) Where are you based?

[asmertgen]

Great questions! 1) Yes vascularization is one approach of many to get nutrients to cells in larger constructs. If you want that to be grown naturally by e.g. endothelial cells, this is a rather lengthy and tricky process, so not easy to scale. To start scaling faster the mixing in a bioreactor is easier. 2) Yes electric stimulation is a great tool to stimulate muscle which is important for texture etc. There are also other methods to get there where they basically stimulate themselves. 3) Monterrey, Mexico :)

[pdc56]

Has anyone done a study where bioreactor meat is offered on actual restaurant menus to see how many people actually order it? Not actually offering it, but apologising to the customer if they order it and explaining the study.

I can't seem to find anything. I find it hard to get excited by technology development in this area without having confidence people will be interested in it.

Good luck anyway!

[kuida0r3]

Does the scaffold you use become dissolved during processing, or are edible and incorporated into a final product?

[vpribble]

Great question: part of the scaffold will dissolve, part of it (edible materials) will be in the final product. The amount of it in the final product (basically the degradation kinetics) can be tuned depending on needs and desires

[hackerfromthefu]

I applaud the ecological perspective, for other people - but I don't want to test this on myself until I've seen a couple of generations of it's impact on people's health.

Nothing personal, that's my opinion of most foods and health things, the effects take time to interact with complex systems, so I want things that have a visible history of generations to observe.

The more I've learned, the less I want to gamble about things we don't really know about but will become a part of my body.

Obviously food of today is a complex systems issue that's not possible to be absolute on to e.g. do what a culture did for the last few hundred years. Which is exactly why I want my own 'experiment' of my health to be based on simpler and better proven inputs.

[ttcbj]

I am very excited about the prospect of cultivated meat. It just makes so much more ethical, environmental and eventually economic sense. This innovation seems inevitable, but someone still has to figure out all the details. Sounds like you have some great insights.

I am rooting for you!

[asmertgen]

Thank you!

[tasty_freeze]

If the goal is to replicate conventional meat in taste and texture, it is a really high bar. But I wonder what fraction of slaughtered animals are used for non-human consumption. Eg, cats won't care nearly as much as humans if it has the proper texture.

[pseudolus]

Great idea whose time has come. Some have estimated that up to 41% of land in the US is used for grazing and growing feed [0]. That's a horrible and damaging waste of resources.

One small suggestion, although you've included your contact info with your launch information, you might also want to include a direct link to your website.

[0] https://www.treehugger.com/land-contiguous-us-used-feed-live....

[dennis_jeeves1]

Will be down voted for this. But here are my unsubstantiated comment: If lab meat becomes equivalent in quality to animal meat the sum total energy will exceed the energy required to obtain animal meat. It's difficult to beat nature when energy efficiency is concerned.( same for for carbon capture). Also nature does it in the lest pollution manner that artificial processes will not be able to match. My argument is not nature-knows-best rather nature-is-excellent at something due to the trial/error nature of evolution over eons.

[wk_end]

Two things.

First, there's no evolutionary pressure to minimize pollution, so I don't know why you'd assume that "nature does it in the lest pollution manner [sic] that artificial processes will not be able to match".

Secondly, even if nature is somehow more efficient than science can ever match for running an entire living creature, that's not what lab meat is doing. Almost everything an animal needs to do - think, feel, breathe, digest, move, maintain organs, and on and on and on - lab meat doesn't need to do. So potentially losses in efficiency for growing meat cells can be made up for by the fact that you're not doing any of the other things animals need to do besides growing meat cells.

[txsoftwaredev]

Beyond Meat is down close to 70% this year. I wouldn't be to optimistic that folks want to eat fake meat. It's clear they aren't selling in the grocery stores.

[forgotmyoldacc]

Beyond Meat is not meat though. It's not even close in taste.

[hughrr]

That’s because it’s expensive, not because people don’t want it. It’s always cleaned out in stores in the UK.

[MrMan]

Is cultivated meat sufficiently efficient compared to the translation of inputs to output compared to vegetables? My primary reason for cutting my meat consumption by 95% is sustainability. Ethical treatment of animals is a distant second.

So if this is still not sustainable, please address why do it, instead of writing a long preamble on the implementation details.

[templarchamp]

The BEST product launch I have seen in HN. Very impressive resumes with grit and passion!! Am a born vegetarian (Lacto-vegan). When 1 lb of meat is produced by 600 lbs of grass, we definitely need more efficient ways of making meat. I dont want to eat meat but I will be your secret supporter and secretly follow your progress. Cheers!

[atweiden]

Pharmaceutical industry insider Paul Wood claims lab grown meat will never be cost-effective [1]:

> For four years, Wood, who has a PhD in immunology, served as the executive director of global discovery for Pfizer Animal Health. (His division was later spun off into Zoetis, today the largest animal health company in the world.) One of his responsibilities was to oversee production of vaccines, which can involve infecting living cells with weakened virus strains and inducing those cells to multiply inside large bioreactors. In addition to yielding large quantities of vaccine-grade viruses, this approach also creates significant amounts of animal cell slurry, similar to the product next-generation protein startups want to process further into meat. Wood knew the process to be extremely technical, resource-intensive, and expensive. He didn’t understand how costly biomanufacturing techniques could ever be used to produce cheap, abundant human food.

> ...

> Wood couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI’s TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI’s analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he’s worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concluded that GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.

> ...

> “After a while, you just think: Am I going crazy? Or do these people have some secret sauce that I’ve never heard of?” Wood said. “And the reality is, no—they’re just doing fermentation. But what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, we’ll do it better than anyone else has ever, ever done.”

How will your approach to lab-grown meat achieve cost competitiveness?

[1]: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...

[specialist]

Are there any efforts to grow organ meat?

I've read claims that organ tissues have more of the macronutrients that our bodies need.

Dr Terry Wahls of Minding My Mitochondria fame: https://terrywahls.com/minding-my-mitochondria/

[badrabbit]

Hmm. The name. It has a connotation lol.

[Nathanael_M]

I was going to ask if it was too late to rebrand, but that felt mean.

[xxr]

They are a grower

[ada1981]

I love this project as a vegan for the last 23 years!

Our group EarthPilot would love to provide support to this civilization scale project.

We work with some of the most brilliant and successful founders and teams on earth on leadership, mindset, high performance, culture and emotional mastery.

[asmertgen]

Great, do you want to shoot us an email?

[triyambakam]

As usual VC money finds an astoundingly naive way to pretend to help the planet.

We could just grow and eat beans.

[Bancakes]

Fantastic! Your product will help millions of people quit eating meat and save the planet.

Imagine diluting the affordable-meat market. "Is this salami real or fake? Ugh I don't know, I'd rather eat soy than glued together chimeras."

[biztos]

> After researching the impact the livestock industry has on our planet, I knew I wanted to get involved to stop it.

I applaud the desire to help humanity eat healthier and saner amounts of meat, but...

I remain unconvinced that creating relatively resource-intensive fake meats is better than using highly efficient non-animal meat[0]. Most people won't eat either one unless they have no choice, but if it comes to that one thing is much better for the planet than the other. And if it doesn't come to that, we're gonna burn the planet to ashes for our McRibs.

Isn't the real solution to eat less meat, as opposed to eating more fake meat?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetia_illucens#As_human_foo...

[UglyToad]

The problem, as a vegetarian of something like 4 years, is that meat is really bloody tasty. Simply put, it's extremely nice to eat.

So rather than a future where we all eat flies or tofu or lentils or seitan or something if we can make a dent in the impact of animal agriculture while catering for the increase in meat eating in Asia then it's a good thing.

[rattray]

I think many people would rather burn the planet down than eat fly larvae.

[cleancoder0]

That is a valid claim. The artificial bioreactors in question are rarely as efficient as the body of an animal. So these "reduction" claims come from thinking about how much animal meat production is reduced by meeting the demand with fake meat, not taking the energy demands of fake meat production into account at all.

[coldpie]

> Isn't the real solution to eat less meat, as opposed to eating more fake meat?

Sure. What's your plan to get there from here?

[mromanuk]

If this get to market, it would make a lot of us, vegan by default.

[Depurator]

Exciting stuff, congrats on the launch!

Does this mean that you are able to create adherent culture while still facilitating metabolic activities in multi-layer tissue?

[vpribble]

Yes we are! While the cell metabolism is marginally diminished by our scaffolding method, the overall cell viability remains high.

[edmundofuentes]

hi Anneso!! congratulations on the launch! It's truly amazing what you and the team have been able to create so far, excited to see more updates in the following months. I agree with some of the other comments around here, this might be the best launch description I've ever seen here. side note: where can we sign up to beta test?

[nnx]

From an environmental and cost perspective, how do you see this compete with plant-based meat in the short-term and long-term?

[tke248]

Does the meat every get exercised with electric current or anything? Can you make it bigger that way like real muscle..

[asmertgen]

There are different approaches of helping the engineered muscle tissue to mature, one being electrical stimulation. It's an interesting idea to use it to increase the volume, but the effect of very high stimulation on texture has to be considered as well!

[jqpabc123]

Great concept!

Can you make it into production? The info I've found shows only 1 venture funding round for $125k USD.

[asmertgen]

We are mainly building technology (hardware and consumables) for the cultivated meat industry as B2B model. Since we are not a vertical cultivated meat company we aim to start production within the next year.

[yazanobeidi]

Why is this better than self sustaining and carbon neutral homesteads?

[Nathanael_M]

Because we don’t need to convince hundreds of millions of people to move to self-sustaining and carbon neutral households.

[whats_a_quasar]

Awesome technology and congrats on the launch :)

[pdog]

Can I see a picture of the bioreactors?

[dibujante]

No real comment beyond cool! Go you!

[mintone]

I have no comment (or knowledge) on the product, but appreciate the way you described this. It was similar, albeit a little more technical, to Matt Levine’s brilliant simplified explanations of technical financial subjects.

[greggeter]

Honest question. Why make meat? Why not use your resources to create nutrition bars? You have to source everything the meat needs to grow anyway (and what are those sources/impacts?), why not just press it in a bar and be done? If you're afraid folks will really miss their meat, so you want to ply them with meat, let me just say - folks who love meat will find the meat they love. They won't likely shift to reactor meat for environmental reasons.

Conscientious meat lovers will invest in regenerative agriculture, lobby for ending corn feeding, reclaim all that land, return it to natural grassland, and let ruminant animals do what they do best -- feed the soil and make meat.

[Nathanael_M]

Just throwing one option in here, if lab-grown meat can be grown cheaper than regular meat is produced, there's definitely a market. I like beef. Beef is getting VERY expensive where I live. If I could get lab-grown beef that's, say, 80% the experience at 50% the cost, I'd happily do that.

I think achieving a future where eating real meat is treated like a special occasion, but lab-grown meat is the norm is possible.

Finally, very few people would eat nutrition bars as regular meal replacements. Maybe there's a (vaguely dystopian) future where people replace most their meals with joyless supplementation, but I think a lot more success will be found in replacing real-meat with lab-meat.

Maybe this is all just too optimistic.

[samstave]

Some future Black Mirror comments on this concept:

You haven't paid your protein bill this month, thus your micormeat subscription has been suspended and your Meat Machine (TM) will no longer grow any new meat for you.

We have given our executives and shareholders an exceptional return on their investments, and with your lack of being able to pay your Protein Bill, our record profits are hurting, Your account has been permanently suspended.

We have reviewed your appeal, and we found that our pricing model of 'meat by the gram' is sound and we have done nothing wrong in preventing you from getting your weekly allowance of allowed protein substance [Product] and hereby will be blocking all access to our services. This is an automated message, you have no recourse and may never contact an employee of Made Meat. Do not reply to this message.

[samstave]

Oh good! I got downvoted!

Alright, MF'rs - I apploud everything about this busniss.. but lets talk long term:

The stem cells are from which organism?

Where did they come from?

---I have an aside from a hospital at UCSF Dog Patch was researching how to express stem cells to a particular tissue.

I watched this machine in fucking person...

Where did stem cells come from?

There will be a black market in ~15 years for stem-call based organs that originate in non human sources.

There will be a bio-ID using the foundation f CRISPR to "digitally sign the origin of the DNA manufactured by this system" -- wait until you have digitally assigned, approved and allotted genes in a hemogonist platform of Micro-meats.

[dang]

Ai yai yai, you can't post like this to HN. We ban accounts that do. I'm not going to ban you right now, but please don't do it again!

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

[bleuchase]

> but the climate crisis needs direct attention in order to stop, reverse and survive the impacts of climate change.

Since you brought it up, are you aware of how global average surface temperature is measured? Or the adjustments that have been made to historic records?

[paulyasi]

Stop before you destroy the planet and people with unsustainable fake food. Cows are an important part of the carbon cycle. https://www.sacredcow.info/

[Nathanael_M]

This seems wildly alarmist. I'm not sure anyone's arguing for the complete removal of cows from the ecosystem. I'm also confident people won't stop eating real beef, even if factory farming is reduced and real beef becomes slightly more novel.

[nopnop77]

Well, those PhD guys don't even know that eating same cells all time would kill our species ? We need to assimilate different DNA from each plant, each animal, to keep evolving our own one and avoid diseases. It's basic and this is why this kind of stuff don't cross some borders. Focus on reducing meat consumption instead.

[wk_end]

Do you have any sources for the claim that we "assimilate" DNA from our food and use it to "evolve our own"?

[d15s]

they can proliferate different cells, changing the starting sample every now and then, animals would still evolve and they could just do a new biopsy