Cultivated meats are a step closer to being mainstream products as Roslin Technologies has made a breakthrough in scaling up the production of cultivated pork. Ernst van Orsouw, Roslin’s CEO also announced a personal ambition to develop cultivated haggis by the celebrations of Burns Night in January next year.
The breakthrough comes from the collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre. The new method can remove variations between batches when generating cells. When applied on an industrial scale, it should reduce the cost of cell culture media by 61%, according to Insider.
The biotech company produces pluripotent stem cells, which have the ability to grow as various different types of animal tissue. At present, Roslin is the only commercial provider of these cells, and supplies them to cultivated meat producers worldwide.
Roslin’s vision expands beyond cultivated pork. Earlier this year, the company announced it was launching Good Dog Food, a cultivated pet food venture in collaboration with Agronomics.
Roslin Technologies is known for being affiliated with the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. The institute is most famously known for being home to Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned animal, in 1996. The company is now said to be one of the UK’s leading agribusiness growth prospects.
In June 2021, Roslin hired Ernst van Orsouw as the new CEO as the company prepared for commercialisation of its animal stem cell platform. Towards the end of the same year, Roslin received a £1 million grant from the UK government to accelerate this process.
“The proof of concept has shown that costs can be reduced, batch-to-batch variation reduced, and now in partnership with cultivated meat producers we can take the findings forward to larger bioreactors and begin the process of scaling up to industry standards,” said Dr. Karen Fairlie-Clarke, innovation and engagement manager at Roslin Technologies. “While there is still further to go to meet parity with the economics of livestock products, we are taking steps to get there by addressing the production challenges facing the cultivated meat sector.”
