- Overview
- Background
- Updates
Overview
Cellular agriculture can be applied to seafood production to reduce our dependence on commercial fishing, which threatens the health of oceans and marine life.1 Why, then, is seafood so underexplored compared to land-based meat?
Prior to this initiative, no public literature explored marine applications of cellular agriculture. We consolidated all of the technical reasons why seafood is uniquely suited for cell culture into a peer-reviewed paper to advance further research about cell-based seafood.
01
We discovered that fish cell culture research is underfunded and opportunity-rich for novel research.
02
Our peer-reviewed publication outlines why seafood is uniquely suited to cell culture and what research can most rapidly advance the field.
03
As of April 2021, the preprint and peer-reviewed paper have a combined 22,000 views, 3,300 downloads, and nine citations.2
1https://ourworldindata.org/seafood-production#the-world-now-produces-more-seafood-from-fish-farms-than-wild-catch
2Metrics aggregated from here and here.
Updates
June, 2019 – Peer-reviewed publication is published open access in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
November, 2018 – Preprint publication is published online.
May, 2018 – New Harvest decides to write a paper about cell-based seafood. From the beginning, we commit to publishing open access in order to maximize impact and public understanding about cellular aquaculture.
Collaborators
This work was funded by an anonymous donor.
The publication was authored by Natalie Rubio,3 Isha Datar,4 David Stachura,5 David Kaplan,3 and Kate Krueger.4
3Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tufts University
4New Harvest
5Deparment of Biological Sciences, Chico State University
See More Initiatives
2022-present
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Cellular Agriculture
Cost and scale are major blockers to cellular agriculture's success, but they are complex technical and economic challenges. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques could help to accelerate much of this work, but there is very little public literature on the various applications and benefits. Given the potential exponential impact of AI/ML, New Harvest and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) launched the AI in Cell Ag Initiative.
2023 - Present
Safety Initiative Phase III: Precompetitive Collaboration on Safety Research and Methods Development
The Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI) is a joint initiative between New Harvest and Vireo Advisors aiming to address critical technical, methodological, and informational challenges related to evaluating the safety of cultured meat (CM) products.
CMSI involves the convening of diverse stakeholders, including industry, governmental scientists, regulators, academic researchers, and others. Gaining such varied perspectives advances public knowledge and the practice of food safety for CM products by identifying and addressing data gaps. Research conducted to develop data and methods build the necessary support elements for the emerging ecosystem, which can raise regulatory and consumer confidence, support industry efforts toward commercialization, and improve the efficacy of evaluation processes of regulatory safety reviews.
Building on progress from Phase I and Phase II of CMSI, New Harvest and Vireo Advisors are now working to convene diverse stakeholders to create the infrastructure for shared knowledge, methods, and data that address the priorities identified in Phase I and II. Our long-term goal is to coordinate and launch regional efforts to develop and validate analytical methods for CM safety analysis and use these methods to generate datasets that can be made publicly available to support transparent food risk assessments and policy-making processes.
2021 - 2023
The Foundational Cellular Agriculture Textbook
Cellular Agriculture: Technology, Society, Sustainability and Science was designed to be the go-to reference for everyone in cellular agriculture - the textbook found in every company’s office, in every university lab, and in every aspiring student’s backpack.
The text provides a state-of-the-art review of cellular agriculture technologies, presenting foundational information with practical application insights. There are chapters on regulatory and policy issues, as well as reviews of the sustainability challenges of alternative proteins.
It is the first resource of its kind to take a practical approach to review the design, feasibility, and implementation of cellular agriculture techniques. With additional chapters on life cycle analyses and ideal transition scenarios, this book provides a resource for aspiring technology developers and academics alike seeking evidence-based assessments of the industry and its disruptive potential. The textbook was written by industry and academic experts for a balanced perspective of the field today and to inspire and shed light on a path forward.