Cellular Agriculture: Learn About Cameron Semper’s Work In Rethinking Cultured Fish🐟
Meet the New Harvest researcher working on deriving a serum-free medium for cultured seafood
Did you know that the number of companies working in the cultured meat industry has grown exponentially from a mere 5 in 2013 to more than 50 in 2019? These companies are working on producing cultured meat products racing to get it on the market. Some of the notable companies are Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, Higher Steaks, Mosa Meat and many more.
Rethinking the Status Quo 💡
The current pandemic has increased awareness about the role that animal farming has in promoting zoonotic diseases. If you aren’t aware, a zoonotic disease is an illness that can spread from animals to humans. Therefore, having humans and animals interacting with one another in populated environments can increase the risk of transmitting these types of diseases. Although there are many unknown variables involved in the process, one way of preventing could be by reducing the human to animal interactions. Cellular agriculture can help with that as products would be produced in controlled and sterile environments reducing the interaction with any animals that can be potential carriers of diseases. Furthermore, over the next few decades, the demand for meat will increase as the global population continues to grow at an accelerated pace meaning it can lead to even more intensive animal production unless we adopt a new system. We need to act now and embrace the change if we want to avoid any more zoonotic diseases and outbreaks.
The Cultured Meat Industry🍖
The alternative protein industry has gotten more attention after plant-based companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods made their products commercially available, which has built up anticipation for cultured meat companies to do the same.
However, despite the hype, cultured meat companies are still in the R&D process as there are a few challenges that need to be overcome.
However, this is only for cultured meat products that are alternatives to beef or chicken products like a burger, nuggets and even steak. The hype for cultured seafood isn’t quite there yet with six companies working on culturing seafood, most notably Finless Foods and Wildtype while more than thirty companies are working on culturing meat.
Culturing meat requires lots of precision and consists of different stages such as cell harvesting, proliferation, and differentiation, where cells multiply in population and mature to become muscle tissue. For this to happen, the cells need a special solution that gives them the fuel or food to function the same they would in our body, increasing in population and specializing in the tissue. This solution is one of the main “ingredients” necessary during this process and is known as a growth medium. Now, if you have no idea what I am talking about and would like to learn about the science used in this process, check out my previous article :
Long story short, growth media are vital as they provide the food the cells need to multiply in population, so there is enough to start forming structures that make up the meat.
Yikes 😬
But what you don’t know is that initially, most of the companies relied on a growth medium supplement known as FBS or Fetal Bovine Serum, which is extracted by inserting a needle into the beating heart of the fetal calf. This is in itself very counterintuitive to the idea of cultured meat as an animal is still being killed in the process, which also, in fact, made obtaining FBS super expensive. The latter is another reason why companies want to get rid of it.
The use of FBS is a major obstacle that researchers are currently looking to innovate around, one of them being Cameron.
Even though FBS might not be the best supplement for cell culture, it contains a large number of nutritional elements and macromolecules as well as a variety of small molecules like amino acids, sugars, lipids, and hormones essential for cell growth.
The crazy part is that somehow, culturing seafood and culturing meat rely on the same Fetal Bovine Serum for growth.🤯
This is crazy as cows are terrestrial organisms, while fish are aquatic organisms. FBS’s proteins are specific for supporting calves’ development, which should lead to no reason for the serum from one being used in growing cells from the other. This would work out fine if the protein sequences of both types of cells, fish and bovine, are the same but, in reality, are surprisingly divergent. So there must be a better way to culture fish? 🤔
Well, there just might be!!
Inside a world where Meat/Seafood products are cruelty-free 🚫
Cameron is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary in Canada and is currently engineering an artificial environment that can allow the growth of fish cells. New Harvest is presently supporting his research to lower entry barriers into cell-based seafood production by deriving a serum-free growth medium tailored specifically for fish cell culture. 🐡
His goal is to identify growth factors that improve performance when culturing fish cells and reduce the costs of cultured fish production, reducing our reliance on animal byproducts and saving the lives of countless fish.
To identify these specific growth factors, Cameron needs to identify different fish-specific factors and synthesize them in the lab.
While many companies have begun experimenting with serum-free media for cell-based meats, they still have to develop a cost-effective formula for large scale production. In addition, these media haven’t been optimized for fish, as very few companies are focusing on culturing seafood.
Fun Fact: Startup Company BlueNalu showcased the first slaughter-free yellowtail
Cameron’s efforts in deriving a serum-free media are to favour long-term goals such as scalability and quality that are one of the main factors that will determine the cultured meat industry. As we well know, every animal is different, so the media derived from the serum will vary from batch to batch for every animal and so standardizing the growth medium would ensure that every bit of cultured meat/seafood would be equally appetizing, which is what Cameron hopes to accomplish in the near future.
Ultimately, Cameron’s work would help reduce the environmental impact caused by current seafood production and save coastal economies from the burden of overfishing. During the summer, I had the opportunity to chat with Cameron. You can listen to our conversation down below and learn about his thoughts about cellular agriculture, and it’s future.
If you have made it to the end of this article, please share it with your friends. Help us bring awareness about this field and spread the word about this fascinating topic.
This article is one of many developed to broaden your understanding of this field with loads of groundbreaking research and developments.
About the Author :
Zaki is an ambitious student who is currently volunteering with Cellular Agriculture Canada to educate today’s youth about this exciting field.
To learn more about Zaki, visit https://zakirangwala.com//.
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