Open Source Bioreactor

Building an accessible research tool for the entire cellular agriculture community

2017 - Present

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

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.