Cultivating a future where antibiotics still work

Doesn’t cell culture use antibiotics too?

With 70% of medically-important antibiotics used for animal agriculture, conventional meat is a major contributor to the risk of antimicrobial resistance. By removing the animal from the equation, alternative proteins—including plant-based, cultivated, fermentation-derived, and hybrid products—are a global health solution.

But even if conventional meat is a major driver of AMR, can we be confident that cultivated meat will help solve this problem? Could it potentially be worse than conventional meat? These are fair questions. Anyone who has worked in an animal cell or tissue culture lab knows that microbial contamination is a common challenge, and that this challenge is often addressed by adding antibiotics to the cell culture media.

The people asking these questions raise perfectly reasonable concerns based on their knowledge of standard laboratory techniques! The science of alternative proteins advances by engaging earnestly with the hard questions and adjusting the approach accordingly. We must approach these questions with open-mindedness and humility. Fortunately, the available evidence provides a high degree of confidence that antibiotic-free production is not only possible but much more likely than the cultivated meat industry depending on routine antibiotic use to prevent contamination.

Whether the future cultivated meat industry is likely to use antibiotics comes down to two questions: 1) Is it feasible to produce mammalian cells and tissues at scale without using antibiotics? 2) If so, what are the pros and cons of antibiotic use in this context?

Is antibiotic-free cultivated meat production feasible?

This is pretty easy to answer! The cultivated meat industry’s goal is to cultivate animal cells at scale without losing batches due to contamination, or worse, producing unsafe products. We know this can be done because the biopharmaceutical industry is already doing it routinely. Whereas cell cultures in academic research are subject to frequent handling, reagents are shared between multiple researchers, and there are many opportunities for contamination to be introduced, the same is not true in commercial-scale biopharma manufacturing. The contamination-related batch failure rate in biopharma has been estimated at roughly 2%, suggesting that contamination is successfully controlled without antibiotics in the large majority of cases.

Of course, the cost of production for biopharma products is much higher than what is tolerated by the food industry, and the cultivated meat industry may face additional challenges due to the use of larger vessels or differences in facility design. Even so, the current state of biopharma provides a clear demonstration that commercial-scale, antibiotic-free production of animal cell cultures is possible while also giving us a rough starting point to understand what it might look like. Further advances to extend this capability at larger scales or under less stringent manufacturing controls is a matter of optimization, not requiring entirely novel technology development. Furthermore, we know that antibiotic free meat cultivation is possible because the one product currently on the market as of October 2022 is produced without antibiotics.

The one area of the meat cultivation process where we anticipate that antibiotics might be used is in the initial cell isolation and cell line development stages, rather than in the manufacturing of the final product. However, because this happens on a dramatically smaller scale, we would not expect cell line development to pose major AMR risks even if antibiotics are used. Therefore, it’s important to distinguish between pre-production and production steps. For cultivated meat to be a useful part of the solution to the AMR crisis, antibiotic-free production is essential, but pre-production antibiotic use is likely to be acceptable.

What are the pros and cons of antibiotic use for cultivating meat at scale?

Just because antibiotic-free meat cultivation is possible doesn’t mean it will happen by default. While many cultivated meat companies are motivated to exclude antibiotics from their production practices, it is fair to consider the economic factors that may ultimately sway that decision one way or the other. As a thought experiment, we can consider the hypothetical “pros and cons” list that a purely profit-motivated cultivated meat company might develop when deciding whether their production process should include routine antibiotic use.

Where do we go from here?

GFI feels confident that the future cultivated meat industry will not rely on routine antibiotic use for production based on the information currently available. Public statements from over a dozen cultivated meat startups—including GOOD Meat, Aleph Farms, Wildtype, Mission Barns, Meatable, Supermeat, Biotech Foods, Peace of Meat, Biftek, Higher Steaks, Finless Foods, New Age Meats, and UPSIDE Foods—support this conclusion. The possible exceptions are in R&D and pre-production cell line development, but the volume of antibiotics used here are minuscule compared to other uses of antibiotics. Because of this difference in scale, responsible use of antibiotics in pre-production stages is highly unlikely to contribute to AMR risk.

From a performance standpoint, the methods used to prevent and detect contamination in the biopharmaceutical industry are transferable to cultivated meat. After all, the batch failure rate due to contamination is low in biopharma, and this is an industry that has to meet an exceptionally high bar when it comes to safety. For cultivated meat to succeed on an industrial scale, we need innovations that will maintain this high level of safety at much larger volumes while also reducing costs. In other words, we need to do the same thing biopharma is already doing, but much cheaper!

Though perhaps conceptually simple, achieving this will require substantial innovation and time. To the extent that there is a risk of companies turning to antibiotic use to reduce costs—which already seems unlikely given the cons discussed previously—the development of low-cost, reliable methods for preventing contamination will also help ensure that cultivated meat production remains consistently antibiotic-free.

The science is clear: the way the world currently produces meat threatens public health. With demand for meat projected to double by 2050 as the global population approaches 10 billion, we need new ways of making meat that satisfy growing demand without the risks to AMR. Cultivated meat does just that and gives us a shot at keeping our medically-important antibiotics working for decades to come.

Header image courtesy of Mosa Meat