Cultivated meat is a mind-bending concept. Take a muscle biopsy from a living animal, isolate the cells you need, and put them in a vessel with water, nutrients, oxygen, salts and growth factors. Keep them warm and circulate the liquid. When the cells have multiplied prolifically, change the recipe to make them differentiate into muscle and fat. The resulting meat paste can be made into burgers and nuggets.
Perhaps you prefer a finer cut? The complex structures required can be achieved by growing cells on edible scaffolds developed by bioengineers working to heal and replace bodily tissues and organs.
A Kiwi start-up company, Opo Bio, entered this brave new world last year. It sells starter cells from cattle, sheep and pigs from its Auckland lab. “If you think of cultivated meat, you need enabling technology to make it happen,” says chief executive Olivia Ogilvie, a biochemist. “There’s the scaffolds, the growth medium, the bioreactors … but we’re focusing on the cells.” Their value is the same as a well-bred seed, she says. “If you have a good seed, you can grow more of a good end product.”
Opo Bio’s wares are fibroblasts, pre-adipocytes and satellite cells, which are progenitor cells that generate connective tissue, fat and muscle. Its customers are local universities doing research in this field and overseas cultivated-meat companies developing their processes. More than 100 such companies exist. “Most companies are working on their own cell lines,” says Ogilvie. “But manufacturing cultivated meat at scale is incredibly difficult, which is why people haven’t brought it to market yet. We want them to be able to focus on what they’re good at.”
It’s a niche that’s so far filled by only two other companies, one in Edinburgh (Roslin Technologies) and another in stealth mode, says Ogilvie. Roslin supplies pluripotent stem cells, which can develop into any kind of tissue and are typically created using genetic engineering. Opo Bio does not genetically engineer its cells.
Ogilvie hopes its cells will be prized for their provenance as well as their performance. Dutch company Mosa Meat boasts of its cells’ origins: “... the cows are free to roam the fields once we’ve collected a sample of cells …” That scene could be in Aotearoa, and Opo Bio is choosy about the animals and farmers it works with. “We hope that story will mean something when products eventually come to market,” says Ogilvie.
Another bonus is that New Zealand is free of some animal diseases.
Cultivated meat is not available yet apart from intermittently in Singapore eateries. But “it’s coming, ready or not”, Libby Harrison, director of the New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre, said in April.
Her statement coincided with the release of a report by the World Health Organisation and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation on food-safety risks of cultivated meat and how to manage them. Almost all the risks are also present in current foods – bacterial contamination, for example – but are controlled by food-safety regulations, which will also apply to cultivated meat. Plus, it’s so tricky to grow animal cells outside animals that it’s unlikely a brew would survive contamination.
Food-safety risks were why a mammoth meatball remained uneaten when it was slow-baked in March. The Australian company that cultivated it, Vow, explained at the time that there’s no regulation for mammoth meat. The meatball was for publicity.
Its cells were sheep-muscle progenitor cells that had been modified with one mammoth gene, which coded for the oxygen-transporting protein myoglobin that also provides meat’s colour and flavour.
Could we eat moa meat? Andrew Munkacsi, a geneticist at Victoria University of Wellington, thinks it’s technically possible.
He says, “A whole genome can be sequenced from a bone or some archaeological find, synthesised in a tube, inserted into living cells and expressed so the genes make proteins.”
Ogilvie says, “We won’t be dabbling in that.”
