Primary supervisor: Dr Tom Mills, University of Birmingham

Non-academic partner: Prof Ivan Wall, Quest Meat

Project description

Global meat consumption is not sustainable even at current levels, yet it is set to double by 2050. A radical change in how we produce meat is needed, otherwise environmental damage by climate change will accelerate, with catastrophic and irreversible results for the planet. The cultivated meat industry is now rapidly emerging to accelerate the path to global food security, eliminate animal cruelty in intensive livestock farming, and make strides towards net zero meat production to address climate change.

The major challenge for cultivated meat producers is scalability and high cost of reaching industrial production. This is because culture media that provides nutrition to the meat cells during production is very expensive and it is hard to intensify the process to get more product per unit volume.

The project will focus on innovation in the form of understanding and advancing the development of low-cost, regenerative, food-grade ingredients, called NEUTRIX and NEUSOL which can be used as key culture media ingredients for cultivated meat. These ingredients have the potential to completely transform the economics of cultivated meat and improve meat product consistency, driving down costs to make them comparable to current farmed meat prices. Our initial feasibility work indicates other advantages including: the feedstocks can be easily produced in large quantities at very low cost; they can support many different meat cell types in bioreactor culture; and they can contribute to final product formation. The project will further seek to understand and develop the functionality of these materials as well as looking to extend stability and shelf life. This will in turn then lower costs and energy use even further, because ingredients often have to be shipped refrigerated or frozen, which is costly and consumes energy

Candidates are encouraged to contact Dr Tom Mills to discuss the project before applying if they wish to.