10 June 2023, Bengaluru, India
Uncommon, a company based in Cambridge, was established in 2017 and is one of many organizations working to make cultured “lab-grown” meat a reality in kitchens and eateries all across the world, offering everything from fake sausages and burgers to faux fish. By creating bacon and pig belly products, Uncommon, on the other hand, focuses only on the $250 billion global pork market.
Since there are currently no other markets in the world that sell cultured meat, regulatory barriers have prevented it from taking off. Meat created from animal cells in a test tube has been difficult to acquire traction. Additionally, the U.S. Food and Drug Association (FDA) has lately begun to certify such edibles as being safe for use by people.
But some nations resist the fake meat revolution, including Italy, which is considering a complete ban on lab-created food to preserve its gastronomic legacy.
Scalability, however, has long been a problem in the market introduction of farmed meat. Some businesses are seeking a hybrid lab-grown meat / plant-based protein method to bring their goods to market more quickly because it is difficult to generate cultured meat in sufficient quantities and at a low enough cost.
But Uncommon claims to be employing a method incorporating a polymeric molecule known as RNA (ribonucleic acid), or more particularly mRNA, which effectively includes “instructions” that let cells produce proteins from their own intrinsic activities.
The co-founder and CEO of Uncommon, Benjamina Bollag, told TechCrunch that this also means that the company can produce real meat without employing genetic engineering. Uncommon believes that because more nations are opposing genetically modified food, it will be easier to expand its production of cultured beef globally.
Bollag further claims that it is utilizing this patent-pending method to help bring the cost of produced meat closer to parity with that of regular beef.
Like gene editing, this approach also makes it feasible to more precisely target the muscle and fat regulators in the cells when compared to growth hormones and tiny chemicals. This, in turn, lowers the amount of raw materials required, enabling the process to be scaled at a lower cost than if genetic engineering were used.
Redalpine, East Alpha, Miray Zaki, Sebastiano Castiglioni, and Sam Altman of OpenAI were among the institutional and angel investors who contributed to Uncommon’s $30 million Series A round. Balderton Capital and Lower Carbon Capital of London and New York also participated. While maintaining a “close eye” on the American market, the company stated that it intends to use its recent infusion of funds to scale up production and launch its regulatory licensing process in Europe and Singapore.
Bollag stated that Singapore “is likely to receive the approval first as it is the most developed ecosystem for cultivated meat, with other markets to follow,” however he gave no timeline for when commercialization may start. “We’ll start with fine dining establishments before moving on to supermarkets.”
[Source: Techcrunch.com]
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