“Advancing plant-based and cultivated meat science,” GFI awards US$4m in grants

20 Apr 2020 --- US non-profit The Good Food Institute (GFI) has awarded US$4 million in grant funds to 21 food scientists from nine countries. Funded through donations, GFI’s Competitive Research Grant Program supports open-access research that advances the science of plant-based and cultivated meat. These technologies are poised to fill the “critical white spaces” in research associated with conventional meat production, from food scarcity and climate change, to zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance.

“The Plant-Based Revolution” trend is pushing up demand for non-animal meat sources in 2020, according to Innova Market Insights. But despite this booming commercial interest in plant-based and cultivated meat, GFI notes that funding for academic research lags behind. Often what is lacking is the open-access data required to overcome technical hurdles and scale up to become a viable part of the global food system.  

“If we want to see plant-based and cultivated meat become an integral part of the global food supply, we must fill critical white spaces in research,” says GFI Associate Director of Science and Technology Erin Rees Clayton. “As we work to find sustainable approaches to meeting the global demand for meat, this funding will enable us to bridge key gaps in alternative protein research, addressing unanswered questions and unmet technological needs.”

The 2020 grantees include top biochemists, tissue engineers, computational modeling experts, plant geneticists and food scientists in the plant-based and lab-grown meat spaces.The nine countries within the GFI consortium are Australia, Brazil, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland, the UK and the US. The 2020 grantees include top biochemists, tissue engineers, computational modeling experts, plant geneticists and food scientists whose research projects address the crucial technical bottlenecks facing the plant-based and cultivated meat industries. Their research is specifically focused on taste, texture, cost and scale-up improvements.

“Plant-based meat and cultivated meat have the potential to transform the global food system, but this requires the industries to overcome significant technical hurdles that remain on the path to price parity, scaleup and commercialization,” says Bruce Friedrich, Executive Director of GFI. “Building a robust foundation of open-access data will enable the entire sector to advance more efficiently and bring plant-based and cultivated meat to the masses.” 

Expected to push up the demand for alternative meats, the European Parliament recently presented a plan to increase the price of meat across the EU to reflect its environmental costs, including CO2 emissions and biodiversity loss. The “sustainability charge” or fair-meat price proposal would apply to all Member States by 2022 as part of the European Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy.

In 2019, GFI awarded more than US$3 million to 14 research projects from eight countries: Canada, China, Estonia, Israel, Norway, Serbia, the UK and the US. GFI’s inaugural grantees have made significant progress in their research over the past 12 months.

Grantee highlights in 2020
Since its inception in 2019, GFI’s program has awarded more than US$7 million in funding to open-access research initiatives that span the supply chain, from crop breeding and product formulation for plant-based meat, to cell line development and the bioprocess scale-up for cultivated meat. GFI outlines the following projects in 2020 that are being scaled up through its funding:

Dr. Marianne Ellis, University of Bath, UK. Ellis’ lab is developing a cellular agriculture life-cycle pod for cultivated meat production. This more compact, cost-effective cultivated meat production system will make cultivated meat more accessible and affordable for more people and enable production in remote locations and developing countries.

Dr. Marieke Bruins, Wageningen University, Netherlands. Bruins’ lab is harnessing plant proteins from agricultural waste and side streams as a highly sustainable method of producing plant-based meat.

Dr. Sara Oliveira, International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, Portugal. This team is creating M3atD, a 3D bioprinted model for cultivated meat design. This project will examine the variables affecting the cell behavior and properties of printable bioinks as well as exploring how 3D printing may be successfully applied to cultivated meat production.

Prof. Che Connon, Newcastle University, UK. The lab uses macromolecular crowding (MMC) to enhance meat cultivation. This project seeks to identify potential MMC substrates from existing agricultural side streams and the ways these may be used to grow muscle and fat cells more efficiently. MMC is an inexpensive method of increasing cell density and yield and could improve cultivated meat tissue density, reduce media costs and lessen the need for growth factors.

Edited by Benjamin Ferrer