- Overview
- Background
- Updates
Overview
We are building a low cost, open source modular bioreactor for in vitro tissue culture to increase global access to cellular agriculture research tools. The project is a collaboration between New Harvest and the Institute for Development of Advanced Applied Systems (IRNAS) in Slovenia.
01
This initiative builds on a prototype created by seed grantees in the United States and Canada.
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Now in Slovenia, the bioreactor travels back and forth between IRNAS and the University of Maribor as a tissue engineer tests each step and the hardware team makes changes in response.
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The bioreactor is designed to rapidly adapt to a constant flurry of new research about cultured meat. Technical specifications (specs) are available on GitHub.
Updates
August, 2020 – IRNAS publishes a peer-reviewed paper in Food Engineering Reviews about the potential of new tools to accelerate cultured meat production.
July, 2020 – IRNAS hosts a webinar about the bioreactor.
June, 2020 – IRNAS publishes a blog post about the bioreactor.
April, 2020 – The bioreactor begins its next phase of testing!
May, 2018 – New Harvest teams up with the Institute for Development of Advanced Applied Systems (IRNAS) to turn the prototype into an operational, open source bioreactor.
January, 2018 – New Harvest’s inaugural seed grantees build the prototype and hand over the project to New Harvest for next steps.
October, 2017 – A team of undergraduate engineers reach out to New Harvest seeking funding to create a bioreactor prototype for a capstone project. Lacking a funding mechanism to support short-term research, New Harvest creates a new kind of grant—the New Harvest Seed Grant—to fund the project.
Collaborators
This initiative is a collaboration between New Harvest and the Institute for Development of Advanced Applied Systems (IRNAS).
It builds on a prototype developed by New Harvest seed grantees Han Zhang, Kyle Manke, and Yi-Fan Chen at the University of British Columbia and New Harvest research fellow Jess Krieger at Kent State University.
The IRNAS team includes Boštjan Vihar and Luka Banovic. Jernej Vaja, at the University of Maribor, acts as a biological consultant.
The IRNAS team!
See More Initiatives
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
Safety Roadmap for Cultured Meat
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. 50 leading 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.