I work in bioprocessing, and overall wasn’t that impressed by the Humbird report. The plant Humbird proposes looks nearly exactly like existing bioprocessing plants for biologic drugs. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that trying to make (cheap) food isn’t possible using plants that are designed to make extremely high value drugs. Let’s take insulin, a relatively cheap biologic drug. One unit of insulin (0.035 mg) retails for about $0.30. Let’s assume during the fermentation we get 20% cell weight, 10 g insulin/L, and have a 50% downstream yield. This means that we have 1.4 mg of cell mass per unit of insulin, for a cost of ~$0.20 per mg cell mass, which is $200,000 per kg. A reasonable target for cultured meat might be a retail price of $20 / kg. We are talking a 10,000x difference here, so it’s clear to me that a cultured meat plant will need to be drastically different than an insulin plant or an antibody plant. To be fair, I’m not exactly sure what the ideal design would be, just that any plant that looks exactly like a biopharma plant (as Humbird assumes) is not feasible.
Keeping things sterile would probably be the hardest element to scale up for culture meat production in my opinion. Equipment/media sterilization is only sufficient if you run a completely closed process. However, keeping your process completely closed is quite difficult, especially if you are using fixed stainless steel equipment. You are eventually going to have to open up your equipment for cleaning and turnover, and you need literal 100% sterility. Even a tiny bacterial contamination will likely spread to contaminate your whole line, since bacteria grow so much faster than animal cells.
Due to these challenges, basically every biopharma plant uses large sterile suites where the rooms have ISO 7⁄8 quality air. This is really expensive, and was one of the major expenses in the Humbird report.
However, where all the existing TEAs fail in my opinion is by ignoring single-use materials. It is potentially possible to have a truly closed system using single-use materials (i.e. plastic flowpaths and bioreactors) that are pre-assembled and pre-sterilized. This would allow you to put this process in a plant with more minimal air purification, which drastically reduces your costs. Single-use bioreactors (SUBs) also have drastically lower capital costs compared to stainless steel, something like 70% lower. The downside of course is that your consumables costs as you need to purchase these plastic bioreactors. As of right now, they also don’t make 20k L SUBs, the largest I’ve seen is 6k L. I imagine larger SUBs would be doable if there was sufficient demand.
I work in bioprocessing, and overall wasn’t that impressed by the Humbird report. The plant Humbird proposes looks nearly exactly like existing bioprocessing plants for biologic drugs. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that trying to make (cheap) food isn’t possible using plants that are designed to make extremely high value drugs. Let’s take insulin, a relatively cheap biologic drug. One unit of insulin (0.035 mg) retails for about $0.30. Let’s assume during the fermentation we get 20% cell weight, 10 g insulin/L, and have a 50% downstream yield. This means that we have 1.4 mg of cell mass per unit of insulin, for a cost of ~$0.20 per mg cell mass, which is $200,000 per kg. A reasonable target for cultured meat might be a retail price of $20 / kg. We are talking a 10,000x difference here, so it’s clear to me that a cultured meat plant will need to be drastically different than an insulin plant or an antibody plant. To be fair, I’m not exactly sure what the ideal design would be, just that any plant that looks exactly like a biopharma plant (as Humbird assumes) is not feasible.
Keeping things sterile would probably be the hardest element to scale up for culture meat production in my opinion. Equipment/media sterilization is only sufficient if you run a completely closed process. However, keeping your process completely closed is quite difficult, especially if you are using fixed stainless steel equipment. You are eventually going to have to open up your equipment for cleaning and turnover, and you need literal 100% sterility. Even a tiny bacterial contamination will likely spread to contaminate your whole line, since bacteria grow so much faster than animal cells.
Due to these challenges, basically every biopharma plant uses large sterile suites where the rooms have ISO 7⁄8 quality air. This is really expensive, and was one of the major expenses in the Humbird report.
However, where all the existing TEAs fail in my opinion is by ignoring single-use materials. It is potentially possible to have a truly closed system using single-use materials (i.e. plastic flowpaths and bioreactors) that are pre-assembled and pre-sterilized. This would allow you to put this process in a plant with more minimal air purification, which drastically reduces your costs. Single-use bioreactors (SUBs) also have drastically lower capital costs compared to stainless steel, something like 70% lower. The downside of course is that your consumables costs as you need to purchase these plastic bioreactors. As of right now, they also don’t make 20k L SUBs, the largest I’ve seen is 6k L. I imagine larger SUBs would be doable if there was sufficient demand.