The startup company Meat Tomorrow is working hard to replace pigsties with bioreactors. A bioreactor is a large steel tank similar to the one in which beer is brewed. But instead of yeast and hops, Meat Tomorrow's tanks will be filled with stem cells from a pig. If the development of the new solution goes smoothly, we might get our minced meat from these steel tanks in the future.
"Our goal is to present our first stem-cell meatball in early 2025," says David Valbjørn, CEO and co-founder of Meat Tomorrow.
The meatball will be a significant milestone for the company, as with it on the plate, they hope to convince the conventional meat industry to begin transitioning production from slaughtered animals to harvesting meat from bioreactors instead.
"We find pig production in Denmark quite problematic. We use huge areas to cultivate pig feed, which burdens the environment, partly due to manure spreading. In addition, it's associated with high water consumption, the development of antibiotic resistance, and animal welfare is at rock bottom," says David Valbjørn.
Before the stem-cell meatball becomes a reality, the entrepreneurs need to make the stem cells divide rapidly and then make them develop into fat cells and muscle cells, respectively. Put simplistically, when the cells are mixed, we'll have the pork.
Stem cells must be controlled
In order to achieve the fastest division of stem cells, one must be able to retain them as pluripotent stem cells. Pluripotent stem cells have the potential to develop into any type of tissue - blood, muscle, bone, fat, and organs - and they start this differentiation if they are not stabilized, says David Valbjørn, who elaborates:
"Pluripotent stem cells can divide almost endlessly, and they do it very quickly. But when they start differentiating into, for example, a muscle cell or a fat cell, they divide much more slowly, and eventually stop dividing altogether. We're not interested in that, because it means that it will take longer to get enough cells for a portion of meat. So if we can keep the stem cells in the pluripotent state for a long time, we can produce large amounts of cells in less time."
Meat Tomorrow has been working on the challenge of stabilizing pluripotent stem cells for the past year. Every day, 27-year-old David Valbjørn arrives at DTU Skylab, DTU's innovation hub in Lyngby, where he and his colleagues can use office and laboratory facilities for their work. Here, Meat Tomorrow has succeeded in developing a solution that can retain the stem cells in the pluripotent phase, and they are now in the process of patenting the solution.
"We've identified the signalling molecules with which we can influence stem cells. With the right signals, we can encourage stem cells to remain pluripotent. Also, we're working to develop differentiation protocols. This means that we need to figure out how to 'turn on' the genes that cause the pluripotent stem cells to differentiate into muscle cells and fat cells. It has to be controlled precisely so that they do not suddenly become brain cells, for example," explains David Valbjørn, who has postponed his master's thesis on the MSc in Engineering programme in Biotechnology at DTU in order to fully engage in the work in Meat Tomorrow.
Scaling up
While developing the differentiation protocols, Meat Tomorrow is also part of a consortium together with another university and company. Together, they will raise funds to invest in a bioreactor that they can use to further develop the production of cultured meat, also known as 'stem-cell meat'.
"The consortium will be Denmark's first concerted effort to scale up the production of cultured meat, so we can demonstrate that the technology can be used to produce larger quantities of meat," says David Valbjørn, who cannot reveal the names of the participants in the consortium as they have not yet been announced.
In the long run, the dream scenario for Meat Tomorrow is to succeed in scaling up the cultured meat production, have the meat approved as food and then be able to sell the technology to the conventional meat industry.
"We're not aiming to be meat producers ourselves. We develop the technology that we can sell to companies that want to produce cultured meat," says David Valbjørn.
Meat Tomorrow hopes that cultured pork can be sold from supermarket counters in seven to eight years.
