Maruha Nichiro, one of the largest fishery, aquaculture, and food processing companies in the world, will jointly research cell-cultured fish meat with IntegriCulture Co., the creator of the trademarked CulNet System, a cell-culture platform that simulates interactions between organs in animals.
Both companies are based in Tokyo, Japan, and neither specified the financial terms of the arrangement.
“IntegriCulture's proprietary food-grade culture medium and low-cost cell-culture technology have been confirmed to be effective in bovine and poultry cells. We will also expand to aim for the world's fastest commercialization of cultured fish meat,” IntegriCulture said in a press release.
IntegriCulture announced on 28 August that it was awarded JPY 240 million (USD 2.2 million, EUR 1.9 million) from the Product Commercialization Alliance program, operated by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization under Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI). The funding will used to build a commercial production facility of cellular agriculture products, including cell-based meat, according to IntegriCulture.
At the lab scale, IntegriCulture has already achieved the production of serum components, which had contributed to the high cost of lab-grown protein cells. By realizing in-house production of serum components, the company no longer needs to use fetal bovine serum and growth factors, which are the main causes of high cost of conventional cell culture. The medium used for most in-vitro animal cell culture is fetal bovine serum, which comes from blood drawn from a bovine fetus at the slaughterhouse. This medium has many drawbacks: the supply is unstable, being dependent on dairy herd reductions; it negates the appeal to vegans who are expected to be a market for the product; and the pharmaceutical-grade medium can be prohibitively expensive.
Commercial-grade plant-based media have been developed, but they are specific to each type of organism and cell, while FBS is effective for every type of eukaryotic cell. By culturing the serum components and growth factors in the lab and imitating their interactions in the body, CulNet aims to produce a new, standardized, low-cost media, overcoming a bottleneck in the industry. The produced growth factors may also be commercialized as a component of beauty products, for example, to promote renewal of skin cells.
After overcoming the hurdle of media cost, the next challenge is giving the product a natural-looking three-dimensional form. Cell culture is usually achieved with the cells floating in a soup or broth of liquid media. The suspended cells can be strained out and formed, like tofu. In 2021, IntegriCulture aims to develop paste meat such as foie gras. Going beyond paste-type products by actually growing the cells in a 3D form requires a lattice to provide support, and a method of circulating oxygen and nutrition and expelling wastes.
As the research is expensive, the company is forming a research consortium and recruiting partners to promote development and standardization in five areas: the culture medium; parts and operation methods that make up the CulNet System; culture tanks; cell-product processing; and seed cells.
Maruha Nichiro’s investment is not an isolated case – numerous mainstream seafood companies are covering all their bases by investing in cell-culture, including Thai Union, Bumble Bee Seafood, and Vinh Hoan. But this is not without reputational risk, as the lab-grown cell protein industry is marketing itself with claims that traditional wild and farmed seafood is cruel, unsafe, unhealthy, and bad for the environment. In fact, IntegriCulture is collaborating with Singapore-based Shiok Meats, whose co-founder, Sandhya Sriram, made misleading and inaccurate claims about the shrimp industry in a 2020 TedXChandigarh talk.
Photo courtesy of IntegriCulture
