- 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
CMSI Phase II: International Regulatory and Government Perspectives
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 of the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI), New Harvest and Vireo Advisors convened governmental scientists and regulators from 15 jurisdictions around the world to identify governmental priorities for the safety methods, data, and research needed to support safety evaluation of cultured meat products to reach commercial markets worldwide.
2020 - PRESENT
The New Harvest OpenCellAg Repository
In order to see our vision of a more just, equitable, and humane food system one of our key strategies is to default to open. By creating an open cellular agriculture repository on Zenodo we ensure that the research produced by New Harvest and other researchers is accessible for all to use, read, share, and build upon. In that way we are increasing the impact of this crucial knowledge by furthering its reach.
2020 - Present
CMSI Phase I: Safety Roadmap for Cultured Meat
The Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI), 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).
This involves the convening of diverse stakeholders, including industry, governmental scientists, regulators, academic researchers, and consumers. 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 evaluation processes of regulatory safety reviews.
Because growing meat through cell culture is so novel a process, many questions about the safety of cell-cultured meat and seafood products remain unanswered.
This industry-wide initiative was designed in partnership with Vireo Advisors to begin a data-driven conversation about the safety of cultured meat.
Fifty cultured meat companies shared previously unpublished details about their manufacturing processes which we used to create a body of publicly available information about how cultured meat is produced and what safety hazards might be introduced along the way.