Articles by Meera Zassenhaus

Company Description New Harvest is a nonprofit organization that accelerates responsible research and innovation (RRI) and collaboration among stakeholders in the field of cellular agriculture. We have entities in the US and Canada, and are in the process of establishing a foundation in the Netherlands. As the nonprofit hub connecting cell-based food startups to academic […]

In addition to giving cell-based food production its own section, the FAO heavily features New Harvest’s safety paper.

Cultured meat and cellular agriculture made appearances in the latest IPCC report as ways to limit pressures on finite natural resources.

After a two-year hiatus, we are bringing back New Harvest’s annual conference. The event will be live and in-person.

From New Harvest intern to research fellow, Natalie makes history as one of a handful of people with graduate degrees in growing meat from cells instead of animals.

Discussions about nomenclature typically revolve around what to call lab-grown meat. Cultured meat? Clean meat? Or my personal favorite, immaculate meat? But other terms had to be created for this work to progress, one of which was subject to surprisingly little debate.

At the start of the pandemic, New Harvest granted Mike McLellan our very first dissertation award to support a novel workaround for animal serum in the production of cultured meat. 

Unlike other serum-free media projects, Mike isn’t trying to develop a replacement “substance” to Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS). Instead, Mike is developing a muscle culture “trophic support cell” (TSC) that will provide the same growth factors typically provided by animal serum. This TSC could be co-cultured with muscle cells to precipitate their differentiation into muscle tissue. Theoretically, this will function as a proof of concept for serum-free tissue culture. 

I called Mike to learn about his research, but the conversation snowballed into an interrogation of Winston Churchill’s fame within cellular agriculture and discussion about how COVID-19 radicalized Mike’s vision for cultured meat’s role in food security.

New Harvest Fellow Dr. Ricardo Gouveia is guest editing a special issue of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences devoted entirely to cellular agriculture. This issue, entitled “Current Advances in Cellular Agriculture,” welcomes articles with a strong focus on cell and stem cell biology, microbiology, molecular and synthetic biology, and biochemical/metabolic engineering, as well as other intersecting topics related to promoting the advancement of cellular agriculture. The deadline for manuscript submissions is November 30, 2020.

In the face of such uncertainty, we cannot continue planning for an event which might jeopardize the health and safety of our community. 

Nominate a speaker or panel topic! Applications close Friday, March 13. 

We sent out a survey to everyone who attended our conference! Here are the results.

New Harvest is funding the first graduate student fellowship program for cellular agriculture research at Tufts University, and Natalie Rubio is the first grantee. Natalie Rubio will begin working in Professor David Kaplan’s biomaterials-focused lab on August 1, 2016, funded by New Harvest through the New Harvest Cultured Tissue Fellowship.

At our conference last week, we used Sli.do instead of a more traditional Q&A session after each panel. Our hope was to encourage a more active and engaging dialogue between the audience and panelists. 

It was a huge success.

The audience submitted questions via Sli.do on their phones/laptops, and the stream of questions was projected onto a screen for the speakers to see in real-time. The audience could upvote their favorite questions, which would then make their way to the top of the stream as they garnered more likes.

Abi Glencross is a New Harvest Research Fellow and PhD student in London working to create “steak without cows.” Abi talks to us about the difficulties in growing muscle tissues larger than .5mm, designing bioreactors, and blurring the line between art and science.

“Ultimately, I think people want to do the right thing. When sustainable, ethical products that are just better for people are affordable, you don’t have to use complicated arguments. The “invisible hand” will take care of that.” Arturo grew up a meat-eater in Texas – an unapologetically carnivorous state. A series of critical engagements with food […]

“Cultured meat is the reason why I got into biology” David is a PhD cell biologist from Toronto who first started thinking about animal-free meat in 2000, when discussing “meat trees” with his father on a camping trip. An animal lover, he knew that animal farming could never have ideal welfare standards, and that producing meat […]