As the world waits for the arrival of cultivated meat, manufacturers and their suppliers are strategizing to cope with the reality of this potentially huge market. Infrastructure and product scaling for growth remain challenges from the supply side. Still, concerns about the pricing of lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood may be the biggest obstacle to consumer acceptance.

Israel-based Profuse Technology believes it has a solution that will bring manufacturing costs down to the point where a pound of farmed beef can achieve price parity with meat from live animals. Announced the completion of a USD seed funding round (and totals $3.75 million since inception). The round is led by New York-based investment firm Green Circle and existing shareholders, his OurCrowd, Tnuva and Tempo. Other new investors include Siddhi Capital, a leader in cultivated meat investments, and Kayma, the investment arm of meat industry expert De-Levie.

The company will use the funding to work with cultivated meat producers, obtain regulatory approval from the FDA, and expand its research and development team and its labs, according to the announcement. The funding will also enable us to commoditize our customer collaborations with a major funding round at the end of Q2 2023.

Profuse’s solution is based on a so-called ‘cocktail’ that is added to the harvested animal stem cells at a time to initiate the proliferation process. As founder and CTO Dr Tamar Eigler-Hirsh told his The Spoon: Meat companies take these cells, bank the most successful ones, and optimize them. They grow them in bioreactors and expand, expand and proliferate these cells to hundreds of millions of cells per milliliter. Must be fiber. This is where our media supplement comes into play. ”

“Basically, the way we found it was to target this natural biological mechanism of regeneration by understanding the biological pathways responsible for it,” continued Dr. Eigler-Hirsh. increase. “There is one protocol for building muscle, and everyone follows it, but it is very inefficient. Currently, the efficiency of converting stem cells into muscle is reported to be between 10% and 30%.” And using our technology, we can increase the conversion efficiency of stem cells to muscle from 30% to over 90%.”

Higher efficiency produces more muscle, which leads to cultivated meat. Higher volume and efficient supply could reduce manufacturing costs, which could be passed on to consumers.

Guy Nevo Michrowski, Founder and CEO of Profuse, elaborates on the issue of price parity. First of all, he doesn’t need that many cells to begin with, as his cell utilization efficiency will be 95%. That is, only 25 days, not 30. And most importantly, the most expensive days are saved. Therefore, the last 10 days, where more than 85% to 90% of the median cost was consumed, require fewer cells, so these days are cut in half. Also, the maturation stage of differentiation and fusion to create them was shortened to he two days instead of ten days. The whole process is just 27 days versus 40 days. This means the factory can produce 33% more per year. ”

The company was founded in 2021 using technology developed at the Weitzman Institute. In 2022, we began collaborating with cultivated meat companies and other potential distribution partners. Michrowski said Profuse is working with major companies in the cultivated meat and poultry space. specific production environment. We work with a wide variety of customers to demonstrate our value in a variety of viable development environments and methods. ”

Related