Dutch startup Meatable is developing lab-grown pork and has $10 million in new financing to do it
2Reported today on TechCrunch
For the full article visit: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/06/dutch-startup-meatable-is-developing-lab-grown-pork-and-has-10-million-in-new-financing-to-do-it/
Dutch startup Meatable is developing lab-grown pork and has $10 million in new financing to do it
Meatable, the Dutch startup developing cruelty-free technologies for manufacturing cultured meat, is pivoting to pork production as a swine flu epidemic ravages one quarter of the world's pork supply - and has raised $10 million in financing to support its new direction.
When the company unveiled its technology last year, it was one of several companies working on the production of meat derived from animal cells - a method of meat production that theoretically has a far smaller carbon emissions footprint and is better for the environment than traditional animal farming.
At the time, it was one of several companies including Memphis Meats, Future Meat Technologies, Aleph Farms, HigherSteaks, and many, many pursuing technologies to bring cultured beef to market. Now, as pork prices rise globally, Meatable becomes one of the first companies to publicly shift gears and turn its attention to the other white meat.
That's not the only way that the company is setting itself apart from its peers in the market. Meatable is also an early claimant to a commercially viable, patented process for manufacturing meat cells without the need to kill an animal as a prerequisite for cell differentiation and growth.
Other companies have relied on fetal bovine serum or chinese hamster ovaries to stimulate cell division and production, but Meatable says it has developed a process where it can sample tissue from an animal, revert that tissue to a pluripotent stem cell, and then culture that cell sample into muscle and fat to produce the pork products that palates around the world crave.
"We know which DNA sequence is responsible for moving an early stage cell to