CCMB-HSI tie up to develop lab-grown meat tech, plan to rope in start-ups

Clean meat production needs far less land and water than conventional meat production, minimises impact of climate change, requires no antibiotics

Weeks after American food manufacturing company Just, Inc. said it would possibly include lab-grown meat in restaurant menus by the end of this year, Humane Society International (HSI)/India and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) on Wednesday announced a collaboration to develop and promote such a product in India.

Being able to produce laboratory-grown meat, also called  'clean meat', on a commercial scale is a revolution in the way the food item is procured for human consumption.

By collaborating with the Atal Incubation Center under CCMB, this partnership looks to promote technology to develop clean meat while bringing start-ups and regulators under the same roof.

For HSI, which works on animal protection issues around the world, the effort to develop clean meat is an answer to the 'unsustainable methods of large-scale industrial animal agriculture' while scientists at CCMB believe it could offer a possibility of augmentation of the nutritional value by using genome-editing technology and synthetic biology.

In-vitro animal products are made from stem cells harvested via biopsy from livestock and are then grown in a lab. The process could also open a new frontier in reducing global warming as livestock is also partly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.

Josh Tetrick, CEO of San Francisco-headquartered clean meat manufacturer Just Inc, told CNN earlier this month that chicken nuggets, sausage and foie gras created using the technique could be served in restaurants in the US and Asia before 2018-end.

For consumers who have a dietary preference for non-vegetarian food, consumption of clean meat eliminates the drawbacks associated with eating conventional meat, according to HSI. Clean meat production requires far less land and water than conventional meat production and therefore minimises the impact of exponential climatic change. What is more, the technology does not require antibiotics, produces no bacterial contamination and ensures the welfare of animals, it claims.

Animal rights charity organisation Peta has been investing in in-vitro meat research the past few years. In 2014, it offered a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring to market in-vitro chicken meat.

"While technology exists to multiply literally any type of cell, including mammalian cells, the scaling up of the same in a economically affordable manner as a meat substitute remains a major challenge. There may also be a cultural and societal factors that will need to be addressed for this to be socially acceptable. Scaling up of cell multiplication at industrial scale is also desirable for upcoming era of bio-actives and bio-therapeutics that are expected to replace the chemical drugs in future," CCMB director Rakesh Mishra said.

HSI/India managing director N G Jayasimha said his organisation would provide a few hundred thousand rupees in seed funding to produce the initial Scoping Paper to understand the bottlenecks and the level of ongoing research on lab grown meat in India and elsewhere. HSI later plans to approach Niti Aayog and other agencies for public funding to make the research and its outcomes an open source know-how, accessible to anybody who comes forward to produce lab-grown meat in the country.

"This is history in the making. Clean-meat technology is taking the world by storm with even the biggest meat producers investing in companies developing the product. It is time India begins this dialogue, and we are honoured to have CCMB as a partner with us for the first step we take in this direction. We are also grateful to Good Food Institute India for guiding us with their expertise on the technology," Jayasimha said.