Would it surprise you to know that lab-grown meat is already in production?
It would be even more surprising if one were to realize that these types of cultured meat products were already in the supermarket.
Currently, though, the top two companies with FDA approval are cranking out small amounts of this stuff – one of them reports somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 pounds of product annually. That’s not a lot for a nation of over 350 million people.
Most of the early lab-grown meats are being put into pet food. However, keep an eye on GOOD meat and Upside Foods, two companies out of California that are pioneering this kind of innovation.
Fueled for Growth
Many analysts looking at the U.S. food market would say that there’s big potential for lab-grown meat.
“The development of lab-grown meat presents an innovative solution to the environmental, ethical, and public health challenges associated with traditional livestock farming,” writes Benedette Cuffari at AZO Life Sciences, as analysts estimate the current market value of this product at $200 million, forecasting annual growth of 15% through 2030. “By significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, land and water use, and antibiotic reliance, cultured meat offers a sustainable and potentially safer alternative to conventional meat production.”
Why Are Lab-Grown Meats Taking On?
In a recent talk, Grace Choi, an analyst with MIT Capital Partners, told us about why buyers would want to embrace meat that is grown in a lab.
Focusing on poultry, she pointed out how it contributes to a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, and disease and water pollution. And then there are animal rights to consider, for example, where animals are abused to create higher-fat product, and housed inhumanely in modern factory farming.
Barriers to Growth
However, Choi noted, lab-grown meat is expensive to produce, and limited in terms of scalability. And it was also hard to “get there” – to figure out the science behind these processes.
The AI Process
Artificial intelligence is helping scientists to come up with more efficient practices for lab-grown meat.
First, there’s structure-based modeling to test protein designs. There’s also AI evaluation of in vitro processes and growth factors. These methods can contribute to really robust research into how to get best product, in ways that are likely to really challenge traditional production as the process evolves.
Choi points out how different kinds of structure-based simulations model those creation processes, and how “assessing mutant growth factors with the best binding energy” can help increase growth factor activity from 6% to 14%.
“This represents a major shift in solving issues surrounding greenhouse gas emissions, food waste, and animal disease,” she said. “Our solution is truly: winner, winner, chicken for dinner.”
The presentation and the statistics around it suggest that many of us will be eating lab-grown meat sometime in the near future. However, it’s going to be based on consumer preference – early polling shows that up to half of all adult Americans would not like to try these alternative meat substances. But for those who feel bad for animals in cages, it might just be the perfect alternative.
It’s one more of those top applications for data-driven AI results – where we were unlikely to figure this stuff out without the amazing brain-power of the digital neural network. There’s also a blizzard of other news around AI applications to genomics, and computational biology (I covered this in a recent post) but this one has to do with something very important – our human diets and how we evolved from hunter-gatherers, to ….?
