By John Cumbers
Cultivated meat is closer than ever to your dinner table, with a massive increase in efficiency that means pork meat can be grown in just one week. When I reported on Meatable earlier this year, they told me they could make pork meat in a few weeks.
That was already a lot quicker than on the farm, where a pig is reared for eight months before being slaughtered. But at SynBioBeta this week, Meatable announced that they have smashed their own record.
“Last year it would take us three weeks to differentiate cells, and now we’ve brought that down to only a few days,” said Daan Luining, co-founder and CTO of Meatable. “We expect to continue to reduce this time period further.
“We’ve created a product of the highest quality with the expressions of proteins and long fatty acid chains which are essential to give meat its unique pork sensory experience.”
What is Meatable’s cultivated meat?
Meatable creates cultivated meat from just a single animal cell using the same opti-ox™ technology as bit.bio uses to make human cells for medicines.
The technology enables Meatable – whose co-founder Mark Kotter is also CEO of bit.bio – to convert animal stem cells into meat.
That single starter cell is slightly different from other companies in the sphere. It’s a type of stem cell, scientifically termed pluripotent, which can be readily grown and converted into special tissue such as muscle and fat – the basic components of a sausage.
Furthermore, Meatable has developed a continuous perfusion process that can generate 80 million cells per milliliter, which the company says is more productive and easy to scale up.
“This marks a very important milestone for Meatable,” says Krijn de Nood, co-founder and CEO of Meatable. “We’ve now demonstrated that we have the world’s most efficient process, which is required if we are to create products that compete with the low prices of conventional meat.”
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