As the world economy and population continue to grow, to address the growing demand for animal protein, people are looking to cell-cultured meat that can be biologically comparable to animal meat, although the technology still has a long way to go in terms of scale and cost control.
Growth factors are the biggest cost driver in the industry. Growth factors are essential proteins that promote cell differentiation, growth, and proliferation. Although used in very low concentrations, it accounts for at least 55% of the marginal cost, making cultured meat even more expensive than diamonds. Scaling up cultured meat production to one percent of the global protein market would require up to three tons of growth factors to be produced per year. Its cost and supply chain are bottlenecks hindering the development of cultured meat.
Manchester, UK-based molecular agriculture startup Bright Biotech, manufactures low-cost, high-yield growth factors based on tobacco chloroplast expression. This technology reduces media costs from $376 to $21.7 per liter, a 17-fold reduction in cost per kilogram. By drastically reducing the price of the growth factor, Bright Biotech hopes to promote and industrialize cultured meat as soon as possible, "addressing a $116 billion global industry by 2040."
Recently, the company closed a $3.2 million seed round in funding. The round was led by FoodLabs and included world-class influential investors Big Idea Ventures, CPT Capital, FoodHack Syndicate and undisclosed angel investors. The company will use the funds to boost its research and development of new genetic engineering methods, expand its team of scientists and manufacturing operations.
"We are delighted to have won such well-known and like-minded investors to support our vision for a sustainable food system." Mohammad El Hajj, co-founder and CEO of Bright Biotech, said, "With new funding and a growing team of experienced scientists and production experts, we will commercialize quickly. This technology is very timely for the cultured meat industry. The first products are planned to be on the market in 2023. ”
"Bright Biotech's approach to using chloroplasts to create growth factors in plants could be a game-changer for the industry and will be a key enabler in achieving parity in cultured meat." Christian Guba, Senior Associate at FoodLabs, said, "We have been impressed by Mohammad and his team, not only with their deep expertise, but also with a speed and progress that has rarely been seen in getting to market. ”
(Source: Bright Biotech)
Chloroplasts are light-driven, more sustainable than animals or microorganisms, and avoid the threat of animal pathogens and microbial endotoxins. The Bright Biotech expression system is stable and inherits through multiple offspring, making the expression system highly scalable. Tobacco cultivation is cheaper than fermentation technology, which requires expensive bioreactors and infrastructure, limiting cost-effective scalability and production capacity, especially at very low yields.
According to the information disclosed by the company, the use of chloroplasts to manufacture growth factors is divided into 8 steps:1. gene synthesis, construction of DNA vectors; 2. Delivery of constructed DNA into plant chloroplasts; 3. Select well-expressed plants and regenerate their buds; 4. Plant in the soil, grow to maturity, harvest seeds; 5. Large-scale planting and harvesting of leaves; 6. Extraction of chloroplasts; 7. Lyse chloroplasts and extract and purify target proteins; 8. Protein characterization.
Using chloroplasts as a growth factor "factory" has many advantages in terms of yield, stability, safety and plasticity: 2-5 grams of growth factors can be harvested per kilogram of plant leaves, and 1 ton of plants can be produced in 100 square meters of space per year; Gene silencing, location, and epigenetic effects are absent in chloroplast genetic systems, therefore, chloroplast inheritance has unchanged expression levels; Plant protein expression has GRAS (generally considered safe) status and is free of harmful endotoxins or viral and prion contaminants, simplifying downstream processes; Highly scalable expression system for continuous and sustainable production of recombinant proteins.
(Source: Bright Biotech)
Bright Biotech was founded in late 2019. Since its inception, the company has received the Educate North Award, as well as awards and recognition from several distinguished institutions including the University of Manchester's Masood Centre for Entrepreneurship, EU EIT Food, Innovate UK Edge and the Innovation Forum.
The company's co-founders, which also include Anil Day, Tariq Ali, Farid Khan and Rania Deranieh, are a diverse team of highly qualified and experienced scientists and entrepreneurs. With a strong academic background in protein production and cell culture from leading educational and research institutions in the UK, US, Jordan and Lebanon, the team can develop robust risk mitigation plans to successfully complete projects when technical challenges arise.
The company is currently producing and supplying recombinant growth factors to the R&D sector to address supply bottlenecks that hinder the commercial use of growth factors in the medical sector, with the goal of embedding its technology into the recombinant protein manufacturing and development market, becoming the preferred partner for biotech companies in the medical, environmental and agricultural sectors.
Resources:
1.https://www.proteinreport.org/newswire/molecular-farming-start-bright-biotech-raises-32-million-grow-and-scale
2.https://www.brightbiotech.co.uk/