Industrial animal agriculture has detrimental impacts on the environment, public health, and animal welfare. Cultivated meat is a sustainable solution, but challenges arise regarding cost and texture. Novel Farms produces scalable scaffolds that can significantly reduce production costs, enabling cultivated meat commercialization at price parity with conventional meat.
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Michelle Lu
Michelle Lu is co-founder and chief science officer of Novel Farms, Inc. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar and associate project scientist at UC Berkeley in the lab of David Drubin. Lu earned her Ph.D. in biology at the University of Oregon in the lab of Ken Prehoda. She holds a B.A. in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley.
TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
Cultivated meat has the potential to ease the pressure on our food systems by providing animal protein that benefits human health, animal welfare, and the environment. However, consumer acceptance, technical feasibility, and economic viability pose significant challenges to its widespread production. The primary challenges stem from the high cost of cell culture media, which contain expensive growth factors, and difficulty in replicating the texture of traditional meat cuts through cell culturing. Furthermore, scaffolding is required to create structured meat products, but current options are unsuitable for the cost-effective, large-scale production of cultivated meat.
Technology Vision
Novel Farms' microbial fermentation approach produces affordable, edible, and scalable species-agnostic scaffolds. The company’s scaffolding platform reduces production costs while providing an ideal 3D surface for cell growth. By incorporating growth factors into the scaffolding as fixed features, Novel Farms aims to eliminate the need for costly growth factors in media. This technology can potentially revolutionize large-scale cultivated meat production, overcoming the major barrier to entry—cost—into the consumer packaged goods category. Novel Farms is poised to lead the way in the high-quality production of cultivated meat.
Potential for Impact
Industrial animal agriculture has significant negative impacts on the environment, public health, and animal welfare. It consumes vast amounts of land and freshwater, contributing to 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and posing the largest threat to global biodiversity. Overuse of antibiotics in animal farming also increases the risk of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Developing cost-efficient methods for cultivated meat production will be vital in satisfying the growing demand for animal protein while avoiding deforestation, carbon emissions, and other negative outcomes of industrial animal agriculture.
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