AI and the Future of Pet Food
At Biocraft Pet Nutrition, we recently announced our new AI tool — something virtually no other cultivated meat company has yet developed — and likely the only food tech AI application that is not a moonshot. (Read on for why!)
We built our AI to both fine-tune the cell proliferation process and enhance the nutritional value of our cultivated meat. AI is helping us identify and understand connections between biochemical cues (such as nutrients in our growth media) and the outcomes they elicit (such as cell growth). This information helps us greatly narrow down the hands-on experimentation we need to do in the lab, which gets us to the outcomes we want far quicker, and at far less expense.
In essence our AI “reads” all the publicly available scientific literature from research publications, public databases, and other sources. It digests and synthesizes these vast volumes of data, and can even make connections between distinct pieces of research. We may have some of the best scientific minds on our team, but our AI tool can exceed the speed and efficiency of the human brain, and thus complement it. It’s capable of reading more reference data, it reads faster, it remembers everything, and it can arrive at more complex conclusions because it’s armed with more facts. It can point our team to the exact information we need, right down to specific sentences in specific scientific papers.
Not only does AI tell us what to try in the lab, it can also identify less expensive inputs and ingredients that can create the same effect, which helps us further reduce costs.
Speaking of pharmaceuticals, we were largely inspired to build our AI tool by the pharmaceutical industry, which has been using AI for nearly a decade in drug discovery and development. Our AI platform works similarly: combing large amounts of research data, making connections between different data sources, and presenting insights to guide lab work. That’s why we say it isn’t a pie-in-the-sky idea: because it’s worked remarkably well to reduce the time and cost of bringing a new drug to market.
For any company trying to bring a technological innovation to the public, whether it’s a vaccine, an electric car, or cultivated chicken, the main costs and time sinks are R&D-related. We believe that with AI to guide and enhance our research, we have made more progress in less time than any other company in our category.
