Cellular agriculture
Within this research theme we focus on making animal-based products using cultivated animal, plant or microbial cells rather than animals themselves. This process, cellular agriculture, enables the production of cultivated meat, cultivated fish, animal-free leather and animal-free dairy.
Our Cellular Agriculture team brings together a diverse team of bioprocess engineers, biologists, biomedical engineers, among others. By leveraging our multidisciplinary expertise, we aim to tackle the major scientific and technological challenges in the cellag space, aiming at the development efficient, scalable, and cost-effective processes for cellular agriculture products.
We believe cellular agriculture has the potential to revolutionize our food system by reducing environmental impact, improving animal welfare, and ensuring a secure, safe, and ethical food supply.
Cultivated Meat and Seafood
Expertises
- Cell line development
- Downstream processing of novel food ingredients
Topics
- Media optimization for cultivated meat and seafood
- Efficient and cost-effective downstream processing of different biomasses to source media components
- Combination of automated liquid handling with Design of Experiments, to test and validate media formulations in a high-throughput manner
Precision Fermentation
Expertises
- Metabolic engineering of microorganisms
- Advanced bioreactor cultivations
- Downstream process design for protein recovery
- Recombinant protein production in yeast and bacteria
Topics
- Increasing the sustainability of food (ingredient) production through precision fermentation
- Enhancing dairy and meat protein production at scale
- Strain optimization to ensure optimal production of compounds of interest
Projects
Sustainability and Modelling for Cellular Agriculture
As the global population rises, traditional livestock production faces unprecedented sustainability challenges. This project develops a detailed Techno-Economic Model to transition Cultivated Meat and Seafood from laboratory concepts to viable, large-scale industrial realities. By integrating bioprocess engineering with economic and environmental assessments, the research maps the entire production lifecycle. The simulation of key operational units identifies critical cost drivers and resource bottlenecks currently hindering commercialization. The objective is to provide a functional framework for cellular agriculture, ensuring that these products are both economically competitive and ecologically sustainable. By integrating biological and economic variables, the model offers a robust methodology for optimizing production efficiency, contributing to the development of resilient and sustainable food systems.
Contact persons: Francisco Tre Martinez and João Marques Garcia
Partners: FEASTS
Innovative recovery of alternative meat proteins
Heme proteins are responsible for the meaty aroma and color-profile of meat. Additionally, the heme iron is better absorbed by the human gastrointestinal tract than the non-heme iron derived from plants. Recently, precision fermentation gained a lot of interest, since this technique enables the production of animal-like proteins to improve the profile of animal-free products. Consequently, the addition of precision fermentation derived heme proteins to plant-based products could improve their taste, appearance and nutritional value. In this context, this project aims to develop alternative downstream processing routes for the recovery of heme proteins derived from precision fermentation and research the functionality of these proteins in plant-based products.
Contact persons: Tim Rammelaere and Antoinette Kazbar
Partners: Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
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