The market for cultivated meat is expanding rapidly, opening huge opportunities for businesses in this sector. Roslin Technologies' vision is to serve cultivated meat producers globally by providing them with key cellular and media tools to cost-effectively develop their food products. Roslin Technologies has already developed innovative tools that serve companies working on cultivated pork products and, in this project, plans to work with Singaporean company, Turtle Tree, a world leader and innovator in novel foods product development. Here, the two companies will come together to develop cultivated lobster and shrimp, a key global market that is set to benefit widely from the provision of protein alternatives to wild-caught or farmed crustacea. The project will blend recent advances in animal stem cell biology made by Roslin Technologies with Turtle Tree's media, bioprocessing, scaffolding and product development expertise to generate novel cell lines from Pacific Whiteleg Shrimp and European Lobster to generate prototype cultivated crustacean meat products cost effectively.

Roslin Technologies Limited (RTL) is a cutting-edge biotech company that aims to transform science innovations to provide solutions to global challenges in agriculture and animal health. The company, a joint venture between the University of Edinburgh and two investment partners with strong global networks, is based in the Midlothian Science Zone, one of the largest animal science innovation hubs in the world. This locale ensures that RTL is excellently placed to exploit ground-breaking innovations in the fields of animal science and biotechnology. The company's modus operandi is to translate ground-breaking innovations from academia to develop practical solutions that help address the increasing global protein gap and, in so doing, deliver products and services that support more sustainable food production. With this in mind, the company has three main technological platforms: Innovative Breeding Programmes, Animal Health Solutions and Animal Cells. The latter encompasses state-of-the-art technologies specialising in extracting, bio-banking, developing and cultivating animal stem cells. A key strand of this platform is the generation of animal induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are special types of cells, generated from mature cells, that have capacity for immortality and the ability to be differentiated into an array of target cell types. As such, iPS cells can be exploited for a wide range of purposes, including stem cell therapies and, now, cultured meat production. RTL's fully-validated, IP-protected iPS cell lines for livestock and companion animals have been shown to be capable of differentiation into a range of key cell types (muscle, fat, bone, cartilage), providing evidence of their potential commercial application. In particular, the livestock iPS cell lines show considerable promise to supply a much-needed resource for the rapidly-growing global Cellular Agriculture sector. Successful early work has been completed at laboratory scale and the company now has several commercial Cellular Agriculture clients identified, some of whom are already developing RTL's pig iPS cell lines into cultured meat prototypes. RTL is now poised to significantly scale up this iPS cell platform, including widening its animal species offering and tackling key bottleneck steps for the sector, such as reproducible culture scale-up for cost-effective cultured meat generation. This project supports the key steps in taking RTL's iPS cell platform technologies to the next stage in which the company will be poised to service the growing number of international cultured meat companies that have been launched in the flourishing Cellular Agriculture sector in the last 2-3 years.

As the global demand for high quality protein grows, more sustainable sources need to be identified. Cultivated meat is an exciting solution that has potential to revolutionise the way that meat is produced. It focuses on developing meat without a need for conventional agriculture and animal sacrifice and has potential to have a positive impact on the environment and to improve biodiversity. Across the globe, cultivated meat and the associated technology-driven companies are emerging as this sector matures and increasingly provides a compelling opportunity. Roslin Technologies (RT) is a Scottish biotech company bringing a suite of revolutionary animal cell products to the global cultivated meat sector. These products include induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) that have infinite self-renewal properties and, at laboratory scale, are capable of directed differentiation to the key cell types needed for cultivated meat generation (muscle/fat). RT's pig iPSC lines are already being used by cultivated meat companies across the world to develop prototypes. RT is currently expanding its species platform by deriving cell lines from cattle and sheep for cultivated meat development. RT now needs to develop innovative technologies to enable its customers to generate muscle and fat cell types at scale. The vision here is to move RT's offering to this next stage by selecting cell lines and developing new protocols to support efficient cell differentiation at an industry-relevant scale. Here, RT will work closely with scientists at Roslin Institute (RI), who will bring extensive expertise/capabilities in livestock stem cell biology and characterisation to develop robust protocols for efficient generation of muscle and fat ingredients for cultivated beef. This team will work with the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre's equipment facility FlexBio (Heriot-Watt University) to de-risk scale-up of the downstream industrial biotechnology processes as applied to the cell lines and protocols derived in this project. The project builds on previous advances made by RT in generating proprietary animal stem cells for the cultivated meat sector and will combine these with deep scientific expertise available at RI and FlexBio to enable RT to build its commercial package for its customers by providing end-to-end materials/protocols that will enable them to generate muscle and fat at scale for cultivated meat production. This project will help accelerate the global sector to commercial reality by applying deep knowledge garnered on bona-fide bovine muscle and fat progenitor cells to support differentiation of animal stem cells that have infinite self-renewing capacity.

Imagine being able to manufacture food anywhere in the world, or even in space, so everyone, everywhere, has enough nutritious food to eat! This dream can be achieved through Cellular Agriculture (Cell Ag). Cell Ag enables the production of food products that would normally come from an animal, such as meat and milk from cows, or from monocultures of crops such as oil palm trees, without having to keep increasing animal or plant numbers to feed our growing global population. Cell Ag, uses biological cell-level processes to create food via the 'building blocks of life' - the proteins, fats and carbohydrates. By delivering these building blocks, Cell Ag will transform food production by complementing traditional food production, so not only can we feed the world, but we can manufacture the food so that sustainability and social responsibility is embedded from the outset. Why would we wish to use Cell Ag rather than animals? Let's take the example of the building block, protein, from traditional meat. Life Cycle Assessments have shown that when comparing traditional meat manufacturing against the expected benefits of using Cell Ag, there is a predicted reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and land use, of up to 95%. The analysis also estimates that we could achieve up to 50% reduction in the use of water, compared to cattle farming. And we could reduce need for intensive farming so improving animal welfare too. So, with these benefits and the urgent need to achieve Net Zero Manufacturing and protect the planets resources. Why do we not have Cell Ag manufacturing in our homes or across all our food manufacturing sectors? There are several reasons - and our research will remove these blockers to Cell Ag manufacturing. Current status of Cell Ag Manufacturing research and outputs in the UK: In the UK (and across the World), there are pockets of excellent research being done, but little that focuses on delivering useable and scalable manufacturing machinery, processes, and systems in a coherent manner. The research tends to be in silos and focussed on aspects of the Manufacturing Value Chain. There are fundamental areas of research that need to be delivered to enable us to realise the Cell Ag potential, as well as transforming current research outputs to be useable. Through this Hub we will bring together the pockets of excellence in the UK, and deliver a coherent and targeted research programme that will ensure the UK Cell Ag research ecosystem is world-leading and has manufacturing impact. Rather than target a particular sector/type of food/product - the Hub will deliver manufacturing research which will enable production of food building blocks at local, regional and international levels. Our vision is to be the world leader in delivering materials, manufacturing processes and skills to escalate the world's adoption of sustainable Cell Ag food production. We will achieve this through becoming the net exporter of the building blocks of life.