CMSI Phase II: International Regulatory and Government Perspectives

Uniting the global cultured meat ecosystem around matters of safety with Phase II of the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI)

2022 - Present

Overview

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.

Updates

April 2023 – Findings are published as a preprint while in the peer-review process.

October 31, 2022 – With the support of the Singapore Food Agency, an in-person workshop was held at the Singapore Food Safety Research Center, co-hosted by New Harvest and Vireo Advisors.

November 16-17, 2022 – Two virtual workshops were held with governmental scientists and regulators, co-hosted by New Harvest and Vireo Advisors.

Collaborators

This initiative was conceived of and carried out in partnership with Dr. Jo Anne Shatkin and Dr. Kimberly Ong of Vireo Advisors, an expert advisory consultancy focused on the safe and sustainable commercialization of new technologies.

The publication was authored by Kimberly J. Ong,¹ Yadira Tejeda-Saldana,² Breanna Duffy² Dwayne Holmes,² Kora Kukk,¹ and Jo Anne Shatkin¹

¹Vireo Advisors

²New Harvest

Donors

This initiative was made possible thanks to the generous contributions of five visionary individuals: Soroush Pour, Lejjy Gafour, Andras Forgacs, Gabor Forgacs, and Kristin Ellis, and to the 23 corporate donors listed below.

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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.

2018-2019

Cell-Based Seafood

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.