Edinburgh biotech firm Roslin Technologies has been awarded £1m to help develop its work on producing meat directly from animal cells.
The funding, through the UK Research and Innovation’s transforming food production programme and the British Innovation Fund, will be used to turn “ground-breaking stem call innovations into a commercially exploitable proposition for the global cultivated meat sector”, according to professor Jacqui Matthews, the company’s chief scientific officer.
Roslin Technologies’ cells have been shown to replicate “indefinitely and without the deterioration that other cell types demonstrate, thereby making them very suitable for large scale, and more efficient production”, the company said in a statement.
Last year, Singapore became the first country to approve sales of cultured chicken. Some companies are now boasting that products will be available in the US next year and that “commercially viable” prices are within sight.
Production costs for cultivated meat remain high though and large-scale rollout is some way off. A recent report by The Counter suggested that some of the claims being made are unrealistic: the cultivated meat sector may be on a “billion-dollar crash course with reality”, the site claimed.
The arrival of meats grown in labs rather than fields or barns is far from imminent in Europe. Katrina Anderson, senior associate at law firm Osborne Clarke, believes that some products will be authorised in the UK and EU as ‘novel foods’, but there are “significant legal barriers” to bringing these products to the market.
One debate will be whether these products can be labelled as ‘meat’ or even in some cases “vegetarian” or “vegan”. “Much will be determined by the conditions by the UK and EU when they authorise the first products in this area,” Anderson said.
The environmental and societal impacts of cultivated meats versus those from traditionally-reared animals will also be closely scrutinised in the coming months. So too will consumer appetite for the products.
“We believe developing cultivated meat is one of the most significant advances that we can make, as a country and as a planet, to tackle the scourge of food shortages and climate change,” said UKRI’s Katrina Hayter.
