Three consortia of companies and universities in the Netherlands will join forces over the next five years to produce animal- and environmentally friendly food products using animal cells. The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the National Growth Fund Cellular Agriculture (CA) program are allocating 4.1 million euros to each of the three projects.
According to the NWO and CA, ‘Cellular Agriculture’ is promising. It is a collection of promising technologies that can be used to produce familiar meat, fish, or dairy products without the need for livestock farming or aquaculture. The ultimate goal is scaling up and reducing costs, particularly for precision fermentation and cultured meat.
Scaling up cultured meat
The UP-CELL project aims to scale up the production of cultured meat via cell technology. An international consortium has been established at the initiative of TU Delft. According to the researchers, the commercial feasibility of cultured meat has so far been limited by the lack of suitable cell lines for industrial production. In the project, they hope to understand the behavior of these cells. To this end, they combine cell engineering with detailed computational models to ultimately steer this behavior toward large-scale, cost-effective cell culture. They are developing a toolkit to modify various cell types from different animal species. The goal is to demonstrate that it works with industrial processes for cultured meat and fish. In doing so, they hope to accelerate the path to market introduction.
MeatUp
MeatUp is the second research project to receive funding. David Kilian from Maastricht University leads the consortium. Within the project, the researchers combine knowledge from biotechnology, cell biology, and materials research to develop a more sustainable and healthier alternative to meat.
Those involved include Dr. Antoinette Kazbar from WUR, Dr. Olaf Brouwers from Hogeschool Zuyd, Chemelot Innovation Learning Labs (CHILL), IamFluidics, SeaweedLand, and Sartorius GmbH. Together, they will scale up the production of building blocks for muscle and fat tissue. To achieve this, natural raw materials such as seaweed and microalgae from consortium partner Seaweedland are used to increase nutritional value. These materials are subsequently further developed in bioreactors into full-fledged pieces of meat with a realistic structure and minimal impact on the environment and climate.
Precision Fermentation
The FungCows project was proposed by Leiden University. The consortium focuses on establishing a new bioprocess to produce cow-free products. The researchers describe it as fungal cell factories to produce heterologous milk protein expression from grass. The partnership covers the entire process chain, with researchers collaborating from start to finish. Leiden University (Avans) focuses on strain design and (HAN BioCentre, BioscienZ) on laboratory-scale fermentation. Those Vegan Cowboys and Biotechnology Fermentation Facility, among others, assist with process integration and validation.
Picture: pexels
Bron: NWO/EVMI