Conference report on Cultured Meat: A New Era in Food Bioprocessing

Scientists have now successfully grown meat in a laboratory which means that there is the potential to market meat that does not require animals to be slaughtered and has been created using fewer resources. UCL Biochemical Engineering has been at the forefront of translating scientific discoveries into real-world solutions since our establishment in 1998 and has a strong history of innovation in cellular agriculture (CellAg). The one-day conference Cultured Meat: A New Era in Food Bioprocessing was organised by the Biochemical Engineering Special Interest Group (BESIG) within the IChemE, particularly by Dr Petra Hanga and Dr Vaughan Thomas from UCL Biochemical Engineering to bring together colleagues from here at UCL with academics, researchers and students at other universities, along with professionals in the industry. 

I’m William, I’m a second-year PhD student working on cultivated meat in the UCL Department of Biochemical Engineering. The title of my research is “Development of a scalable food-grade culture medium for cultivated meat” and Dr Petra Hanga is my supervisor. I got into this topic because it was the ideal blend between my skills in cell biology and my passion for animal welfare and climate. I did my undergraduate degree in human biosciences before working in a few different roles in cell biology, studying cell therapy, cancer and even COVID before finding a role at a cultivated meat company, Hoxton Farms. I saw the great potential for cultivated meat in this role but felt there needed to be more done in this field in the academic space.  

My research focuses on creating a low-cost, food-grade growth medium for cultivated meat. The growth medium is the food we feed the cells to grow, so far it is one of the cost drivers of cultivated meat and if it is to ever be comparable in cost to conventional meat it needs to be much, much cheaper. So far, I've learned so much about food biochemistry, mammalian bioprocessing and muscle biology, which I never imagined myself doing earlier in my career. I hope my work can help pave the way for the industry to converge on much lower costs, making the products much more cost-effective and feasible." William Gordon-Petrovskii, April 2024

Session One 

The morning session of the conference featured expert speakers Professor Gary Lye, MFL Director at UCL East, Yvonne Armitage from CPI, Akin Odeleye from Ivy Farm, and Nik Watson from the University of Leeds. Gary introduced the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub (CARMA) the largest grant cellular agriculture research grant in the UK so far to enable sustainable manufacturing in cellular agriculture. Yvonne Armitage from CPI described case studies from their novel food innovation centre on how they can translate academic technologies further to commercialisation. Akin Odeleye outlined how Ivy Farm’s integrated computer-aided design technologies alongside computational fluid dynamics can help model and de-risk scale-up challenges cultivated meat companies face. Finally, Nik Robinson outlined how AI can help aid sustainable and resilient food manufacturing, combining sensors with machine learning models. 

The panel from this session highlighted the fact that skills and training are key areas that need developing for this field, that people don’t need direct experience, but they do need the right transferable skills. Also highlighted in the discussion was the need for more strong role models who are food engineers “Everyone knows celebrity chefs who feed hundreds of people, but no one knows celebrity food engineers who feed hundreds of thousands of people.” 

"I’m Paul, a third-year PhD student working in the cultivated meat research sphere in the UCL Department of Biochemical Engineering. I did my undergraduate in bioengineering at Imperial College, specifically looking at regenerative medicine, stem cell therapies, and novel biomaterials. Upon finishing my MEng, I was lucky to spend a year working at Ivy Farm Technologies as a research associate in their bioengineering team. This was my introduction to cellular agriculture, and it highlighted how I could utilise and adapt my skill set in cell culture and novel therapeutics to commercialisation and bioprocessing scale-up. The end goal of cellular agriculture is to revolutionise global food systems and have a positive, lasting impact on the climate through a reduction in land, water, and energy consumption. I joined the UCL research programme to hone my skills as an independent researcher. 

My research focuses on developing a scalable, animal component-free bioprocess for cultivated meat production. Specifically, hydrogels derived from plants and seaweed are used as scaffolds for the proliferation and differentiation of fat and muscle cells, which can then be harvested and eaten. Fat cells (adipocytes) and muscle cells (myoblasts) are both adherent, meaning they need to attach to a substrate to grow and they can’t just float around in a bioreactor. My research aims to remove animal-derived matter from the process, to ensure its sustainability and independence from the intensive farming industry." Paul Cameron, April 2024

Links 

• Manufacturing Futures Lab at UCL East 
• Studying at UCL Biochemical Engineering 
• Dr Petra Hanga's UCL Profile 
• Prof. Gary Lye's UCL Profile