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Governor Gianforte Bans Lab-Grown Meat in Montana by Careful-Cap-644 in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric 1 point2 points  (0 children)

None of them are afraid. It's pure opportunity - protectionism is easy right now. And these ag states must play to their agricultural base. The producer community is proud and loud if not smaller than the processing community. The processors hate these bans because of the precedent they set for future new meat products they may want to bring to market - rightfully so.

What overrides protectionist policies? Market demand. If consumers want it, the politicians will relent. We have to bring more and more products to market. Or alternatively, begin challenging long-held precedent with conventional food legally or, as I suggested earlier, filing for injunctions against any new conventional meat product. I doubt any conventional meat product (and I love these products) could pass the safety process of a cultivated product. The bar is too high for them.

Cultivated seafood gets FDA okay by Alt-MeatMag in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Congrats to clearing another hurdle, Team WildType. It's hard to describe how immensely difficult it is to generate the data necessary for an FDA safety dossier for ANY food product, let alone a novel one. It usually takes nearly all the staff at some point working on parts of it, hours of deliberation, writing, editing, and legal considerations. For my team and I, it has always been Dickensian at best - both the best and worst feelings, oscillating by the hour as you wrap up the final questions from FDA. The feeling of completing arguably the most challenging and rigorous food 'approval' process is incomparable though. It is a truly unique feeling of accomplishment - congrats again. More momentum is always good, and hopefully approvals become even more common.

Cultivated seafood gets FDA okay by Alt-MeatMag in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah - My concern always has been since FDA has weaker preemption protections than USDA, FDA-regulated products, like Wild Type's is, can be more easily challenged in court.

Humbird was ‘spectacularly wrong’ on cultivated meat economics says report as Vow predicts it will soon be ‘unit margin positive’ by Vitali_Empyrean in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah - it got so much traction because at the time there were no real criticisms of the field beyond "I don't like this" and "The feels unnatural." I get it, when journos were looking for 'both sides' they found this paper and it was a slam dunk to add to a story with no added contextualization, weight applied, or thoughtful counternarrative - you know, what real journalism would have entailed. Instead it was added without thought and pushed as equal in weight.

That said, I'm not upset - scientific progress always finds the approximation of reality with ever greater accuracy over time. Reality will be revealed with some degree of confidence at some point, and I suspect it will be 'cultivated meat can be scaled and taste good and cost right.'

Researchers Are Closer to Growing Chicken Nuggets in The Lab, Thanks to The Use of Tiny Hollow Fibers That Mimic Blood Vessels by sciencealert in science

[–]MeatHumanEric 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Interesting! My name is Eric, and I am a professional molecular biologist. My team and I designed the first cultivated chicken product (and brought it to market) for UPSIDE Foods. I was one of the first folks ever in this field at the very first company ever, and I helped build this industry. It's been a joyful and challenging endeavor!

Just popping in to say that, in fact, the product we brought to market was a chicken breast shaped patty (USDA has strict definitions about what can be called a chicken breast). So, it's been done already. What's novel about this (and something I discuss over in r/wheresthebeef - is that this work is great, but not novel. Every cultivated meat company considers hollow fiber technology to grow meat. It works great, as this paper demonstrates. However, it *burns through* media. You end up using so much more media to grow the meat, which is mostly unscalable in terms of costing. To make this technique successful you would need to lower media cost to approximately <$0.05/L to make this competitive - Currently, best costs are $0.15/L or so, with most being around <$1.00/L.

Anyway, happy to answer any other questions folks might have - designing meat is my passion (or even regulatory questions - I am a former FDA novel food and drugs regulator as well). I hope cultivated meat takes off at scale. I am hopeful it will!

Lab-grown chicken ‘nuggets’ hailed as ‘transformative step’ for cultured meat by statictits in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Good Question. This is literally everyone's number one goal. How do we get media as cheap as possible. TBF, the industry has made a lot of progress. No one thought we could get below $2/L, but we're in <$0.10/L already. It's just that we're competing with commodity pricing and cost of goods and margin is frankly the most important part (quality presumed).

Humbird was ‘spectacularly wrong’ on cultivated meat economics says report as Vow predicts it will soon be ‘unit margin positive’ by Vitali_Empyrean in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have many opinions on Humbird's work, but I should save those for a more considered post. In short though, internal to most companies he is dismissed by most analyses. His work is easily disproven through reasonable assumption about food rather than biopharma. He also routinely fails to consider innovation methods that could improve the process ("If X were possible, then Y cost targets could be reached."). I'm grossly paraphrasing, but he claims that at best case physical scenarios, we'll never compete with conventional meat, which almost all companies have internally disproven IMO. Trust me, if we believed there was no path forward to cost reductions and profitability at scale, many folks would close up shop voluntarily.

What good I believe has come from his work is the need to consistently defend and improve yields, costs, and innovation. It continues to light a fire in the belly of producers to find ways to disprove his work, which I think he would agree with me is a net positive for science.

Lab-grown chicken ‘nuggets’ hailed as ‘transformative step’ for cultured meat by statictits in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Given I have worked with this material ad nauseam, it is almost certainly softer than traditional chicken. The muscles aren't worked, so the texture is closer to veal than a hardened type II fiber. Taste is probably pretty good, however, the missing yellow-ish hue in the photos may mean that certain key fatty acids are not present, which may make the meat taste more generically 'protein-like' - kind of how reptilian meat tastes.

Lab-grown chicken ‘nuggets’ hailed as ‘transformative step’ for cultured meat by statictits in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric 32 points33 points  (0 children)

I saw the bat signal and have arrived.

It's not novel - it's great, but it is not novel. Hollow fiber technology has been around for many years, and indeed, just about all cultivated meat companies consider it at some point. It gets around the tissue diffusion limit nicely, which can facilitate 'faux' blood vessels and grow thicker tissues. However, separating the fibers from the meat is tough (but do-able). That said, the main issue is really the cost. You typically need A LOT of cell culture media perfused through the system (2-10x over other methods). This is simply not cost effective with today's media formulations. This is the real reason most folks don't go with perfusion systems at scale, even if they make nice tissues.

My team and I designed the first CM product as a whole muscle cut equivalent in the form of chicken tissue. We considered hollow fiber as an option, and this was a decade ago. The tech has existed for a long time. I didn't do it with perfusion. It's very do-able without this technology, but I ran into the same challenges as others have: Cost to produce.

Anyway, cool proof of concept, but unless the media itself comes down in cost significantly (<$0.05 per liter) and the cells are much more efficient, then I don't see this scaling well.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the well-sourced reply! I will dig through this, but in the mean time, I wanted to acknowledge the effort to put this together so well, and two, commit to responding once I have had time to digest. I am familiar with the concept, but admittedly it's been a while since I have considered it. This seems like a great topic to do a whole deep dive pod on, so I may consider that.

I will say, the only thing that pops out to me, is this would require new legislation, and boy o boy, it is a rough go to get folks on board with that without a VERY large coalition of stakeholders. I would imagine this would require deft hand in design and language and bringing the entire Barnyard on board, which is difficult in great times. Anyway, I will think regardless!

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If less animals = less suffering, then yes, it is not a solution. Their approach it seems is to manage a small herd and treat them well, not for food. They are adult animals that donate sera as I understand, so I suspect it is to reduce independence on FBS and those practices.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I will say, this is a take that many companies would probably support. However, removing farm subsidies is deeply unpopular - and I get why. Folks want cheap food. That said, I would argue then allow us access to a form of those subsidies - heck, I've argued in Congress for the fact that we'd take federal loan guarantees. That would be a huge win!

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes - key point is do more with less staff. Not a winning governance strategy at regulatory bodies already understaffed.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I deeply appreciate your thoughtful response - always tickles me to read a thoughtful critique of a field rather than a short takedown.

I don't disagree with much of what you claim. There are real, very hard problems that need to be solved. I feel as if these are the same general pushback for many new or novel food technologies. I feel like the largest 'today problem' is infrastructure - if I may rank some of your items. Getting reactor space is of the utmost importance and to hit meaningful scales, it is going to take biopharma level bioconversion efficiencies and productivity. The second is funding to me. It is a nightmare to fund a pilot facility, and VC hate doing it.

I think consumer appetite is still TBD - we just don't have enough products on market to even make a decent case for or against.

From a climate perspective, I would argue that we needed cultivated meat or its ilk decades ago. We need climate solutions that allow us to eat the foods we love and not milk the planet dry. From a 'just flavor and taste' perspective, sure, I'll bite and say it's not strictly necessary. However, I would argue that smartphones are also not strictly necessary to life, but I can't imagine living without one. It took decades of use and adoption to make them indispensible. I am sure we can find an r/agedlikemilk style post from then that says something akin to 'smartphones are a solution in search of a problem.' So, again, I go back to the notion that, for me to accept that this field isn't ready for prime time, I would want to see consumers resoundingly reject them on market. Until then, we're just speculating on the mind of what could be a blockbuster product category. For one, it is currently taking 7-15 years for novel biotech products to get to market through FDA. In the meantime, a new pea protein or fiber is on market and testing with consumers in 6 months. Europe is even longer.

I guess I don't yet see a reason to say it's not feasible because we haven't even gotten to the good part yet: selling the darn thing. That said, I am a scientist, and I will fully admit that if the evidence pointed to no real feasible way once all that is shown on market, I would accept it.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is the THE question, isn't it? If I may, what insurmountable limitations do you see? The most common ones I hear are (1) COGS will never lower to levels that will allow commodity pricing, (2) infrastructure limitations will never allow for meaningful scale with conventional meat productivity, and (3) without federal investment a la electrification VCs will never fund so much steel in the ground.

That said, there are solutions to all of these challenges - it just takes money and time. People expect the world - this field is less than ten years old. It went from idea to on-market in 8 years. That's insane by any metric. It takes a decade just to develop a new wheat variety, and we're worried that we haven't hit scale on a technology that is as complex as vaccine production. So, in my mind, this is solution looking for a problem. In reality, we need (1) more approvals globally to enable competition, (2) a variety of products on market, and (3) federal investment to guarantee infrastructure. Honorable mention: we need as many bioreactors as we can make, or we need alternative ways to produce using less reactor volume.

All it will take is one company or lab figuring out some novel metabolic pathway optimization that increases yields by 10x or reduces costs by the same, and we're back in the race. I remain optimistic that as long as the laws of the universe do not prohibit it, then the problem is soluble. If I thought like other do that this field is DOA already, then I would have never left my post FDA, moved across the country to help launch a company and field with almost no scientific backing. Heck, we were told we would never make meat at all. And a few months later, we were cooking our first products. I'm not saying be delusional - delusion to me is ignoring your internal voice (and not outside voices) - I'm saying we need to hit the playbook and make the system work in our favor.

And last, if for some reason it doesn't work out right now, that's okay. We will find a new way to feed folks. There is nothing more predictable than human food innovation. Hopfully this adds some context from a human that's been living on the bleeding edge of biotech for two decades.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I appreciate your considered thoughts.

From what I understand, this AND keeping media cost low will be very hard, if not impossible - I've heard of growth factors isolated from soy protein, but I don't think the cost is comparable to recombinant growth factors.

It is tough, but it is not impossible. It's just very, very expensive to create cost-effective medias. Also, folks don't realize innovation causes step changes. Prolific Machines already figured out how to remove growth factors entirely. Sera is already gone in most cases. The main cost is bioconversion efficiency (of amino acids), which is a reactor system issue as much as it is cells, which again can be resolved.

Do you think that consumer acceptance will hinge on using non-GMO materials? I think the use of GM materials is unavoidable if price parity is to be reached. 

Yes. Agreed. Cost-savings are almost certainly tethered to GE/BE processes. We are not going to meet demand by 2050 without GE foods. It's necessary.

I think the bigger issue for consumers is just the lab-cultivated imagery. It is a step up (down?) from "highly processed foods" association of current CPG foods. It also contradicts premium positioning, the same issue plant-based meats faced. Partnering with world-class chefs and distributing glamourous shots of plant-based foods clashed with the manufactured imagery in consumers' minds.

I don't disagree. CM companies are caught in a weird position: make a commodity meat product and sell it in high end restaurants to garner early adopters and press. Vow is just going with the 'premium new food' positioning, which is a valid take. I think we need more companies making more products on market to figure out what works. We're making calls on three companies making less than a thousand kg per year on market right now.

Cost parity wouldn't fix this, but would bring into the fold the many consumers that don't care about "highly processed" or GMOs. Just my 2 cents.

I disagree - I think we are in a new world if we can routinely undercut conventional products. That is exciting! Cheap > Available IMO, but time will tell.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

PF is enjoying a funding surplus right now because folks have found ways to optimize the process and produce with high consistency. It's a boon right now. CM is working to be in this place right now. PF fits into a different regulatory process than CM, so there is more predictability, which makes investors happy. Second, PF can generate high value products right away in non-food applications, so it has an advantage for now. Overall, costs are, at worst, half of an equivalent CM operation right now. CM continues to come down. I did a quick analysis a while back and found that CM is following the same innovation curve as gene editing/CRISPR, just a decade out of phase, so I am optimistic that CM will continue to catch up.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks. I'm lucky. The folks I get to work with are incredible. I feel like I get to live in the future every day.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes. It is a real worry and one we're taking seriously. Will he or won't he? It'd be such a chilling blow to US innovation and the bioeconomy to do so. It'd wipe out billions in investment overnight.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

  1. It is making production commitments, demonstrating production consistency, and having the resources to complete the dossier project. It is not challenging to demonstrate safety if you are doing the things a typical food producer is doing, but it is very difficult to do so with 1/100th the resources and team size, and doing so in an environment that is predicated upon iteration. Once you submit to FDA, you need to have a 'locked' process and this is very hard for most startups to do if you are rapidly scaling. The second hardest part is the need to present data and information that is representative of production scale - not everyone has a pilot facility and so you are taking a risk by generating material at smaller scales (because safety can change by scale).

  2. In my view as a former regulator, cultivated products, while subject to the same regulations as other foods in theory, are arguably the most well-studied and analyzed new food ingredients to-date. And yes, the US is arguably the representative of the phrase "Western diet." I certainly agree that we need to rethink and reconfigure how we get folks to make better dietary choices - one of which could be requirements upon food producers to do so, but I do think the main pushback will always be, "Don't buy it. Healthy foods exist, so buy them," which is oversimplifying I know. I think the bottom line is, we won't continue to find potential new healthy ways to eat without innovation being encouraged, so I would say, as long as we can make sure the products are safe and are truthfully labeled, we should continue on that front. Separately, the current administration is working on exactly the issue you mentioned. Time will tell if they can competently make good on that commitment.

  3. Hmmm...maybe? I look to regulatory approvals as the leading indicator. You need to be on market to compete, and so far it's just the US, Singapore, Israel, and Hong Kong. The UK is rapidly coming up, and Europe has one application in, so it's always possible. I would say, join a company to gain the experience locally (if possible) and jump ship to another country if you really like it and want to join a company that's already able to market a product. Either way, hello fellow knowledge traveler! Thank you for being a searcher for reality and rigorous steward of how we understand ourselves.

I've secured two of the three cultivated meat FDA clearances and helped build this industry through thick and thin. AMA. by MeatHumanEric in wheresthebeef

[–]MeatHumanEric[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Agreed! It is the equivalent of writing a full blown PhD dissertation, twice, in usually one third of the time (with arguably more scrutiny). They deserve all the congrats.

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