Where do we go from here?
GFI feels confident that the future cultivated meat industry will not rely on routine antibiotic use for production based on the information currently available. Public statements from over a dozen cultivated meat startups—including GOOD Meat, Aleph Farms, Wildtype, Mission Barns, Meatable, Supermeat, Biotech Foods, Peace of Meat, Biftek, Higher Steaks, Finless Foods, New Age Meats, and UPSIDE Foods—support this conclusion. The possible exceptions are in R&D and pre-production cell line development, but the volume of antibiotics used here are minuscule compared to other uses of antibiotics. Because of this difference in scale, responsible use of antibiotics in pre-production stages is highly unlikely to contribute to AMR risk.
From a performance standpoint, the methods used to prevent and detect contamination in the biopharmaceutical industry are transferable to cultivated meat. After all, the batch failure rate due to contamination is low in biopharma, and this is an industry that has to meet an exceptionally high bar when it comes to safety. For cultivated meat to succeed on an industrial scale, we need innovations that will maintain this high level of safety at much larger volumes while also reducing costs. In other words, we need to do the same thing biopharma is already doing, but much cheaper!
Though perhaps conceptually simple, achieving this will require substantial innovation and time. To the extent that there is a risk of companies turning to antibiotic use to reduce costs—which already seems unlikely given the cons discussed previously—the development of low-cost, reliable methods for preventing contamination will also help ensure that cultivated meat production remains consistently antibiotic-free.
The science is clear: the way the world currently produces meat threatens public health. With demand for meat projected to double by 2050 as the global population approaches 10 billion, we need new ways of making meat that satisfy growing demand without the risks to AMR. Cultivated meat does just that and gives us a shot at keeping our medically-important antibiotics working for decades to come.
Header image courtesy of Mosa Meat
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Author Chelsea Montes de Oca
