As numerous cultivated meat start-ups move beyond the proof-of-concept phase, they run into a major challenge – developing a scalable, cost-effective production platform to make cultured meat affordable for the mass market.
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Now BioBetter, an Israeli foodtech start-up, has found a new used for the tobacco plant – to help produce lab-grown meat.
Cell-derived meat requires a culture medium composed of a mix of amino acids, nutrients, and – most importantly – growth factors (GFs), without which cells cannot multiply. BioBetter is working behind the scenes of the emerging cultured meat industry to repurpose tobacco plants to create the necessary growth factors.
Currently, GFs are expensive, due to the complexity of producing them. Some can be attained via fermentation of yeast or bacteria, but these methods require expensive facilities.
BioBetter has found of way of turning tobacco plants into turning tobacco plants into bioreactors to express and produce the proteins on a large scale. Plant bioreactors use renewable energy and fixate carbon dioxide, and are also They are self-forming, self-sustaining, and biodegradable.
BioBetter uses a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant while delivering a high-purity product at broad scale production. The company currently sources tobacco plants from local growers but the goal is to eventually source the raw material from tobacco growers globally.
Ultimately, the startup expects its technology to help lower the cost of producing cultivated, slaughter-free meat.
"Our GF technology will enable production of animal-free GFs at a scale of thousands of tons per year, and at a cost of $1 per gram. This will alleviate one of the biggest bottlenecks in advancing cultured meat to mass production," says Professor Oded Shoseyov, who co-founded BioBetter with CEO Dr. Amit Yaari, Dr. Dana Yarden, and Avi Tzur.
"There are multiple advantages to using Nicotiana tabacum as a hardy vector for producing GFs of non-animal origin," says Yaari.
Yaari explains that tobacco is an abundant crop that has no place in the food-and-feed chain due to its bitter taste and content of undesirable alkaloids. In addition, the global trend against smoking is also causing concern for tobacco growers that their crop might become obsolete.
"But the tobacco plant has huge potential to become a key component in the future of food," Yaari says. Tobacco plants can achieve up to four growth cycles annually and be harvested all year. This translates to more voluminous outputs per square meter of growing space.
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