These Japanese Bio-Hackers Are Growing Affordable Meat in A Lab – Shojinmeat

Growing our meat in a lab or factory has been a science fiction staple for decades, but much like jetpacks, it has never quite worked out in practice -- at least not at scale. Yuki Hanyu and his team at Shojinmeat, however, are changing that.

Actually, scientists have been growing muscle tissue in labs for more than 100 years, but Shojinmeat has developed techniques that bring the cost down to less than one 1,000th of traditional approaches. Now, that still leaves it too expensive for most commercial applications, but Yuki explains how his team (and others) will bring the costs down into the commercial range very soon.

We also talk about both why Japanese life-sciences startups have such a hard time raising money in Japan and how Shojinmeat found a way to make the system work for them.

It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Show Notes for Startups

How do you grow meat in the Lab? Why cellular agriculture doesn’t get funding Is lab-grown meat kosher? Combining open research and patent protection How to bring down the cost of cultured meat Solving the taste problem How cultured meat will become available

Links from the Founder

Everything you ever wanted to know about Shojinmeat How Integriculture is commercializing lab-grown meat Check out Yuki's blog Follow him on twitter @yukihanyu1 New Havest talks about Yuki's project

[shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment

Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 83.

Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.

Today we’re going to talk about the future of meat. Many would say the future of humanity, but really today we’re just going to talk about the meat. Yuki Hanyu and his team at ShojinMeat are growing meat in the lab, and they’re doing it at a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Actually, it turns out that lab-grown meat or cellular agriculture—as the discipline is actually called—is not particularly new. It’s been in active development all over the world for well over 100 years. What’s different about ShojinMeat, however is that they’ve been able to bring the cost down by an astounding three orders of magnitude. And that brings a technology within striking distance of a lot of practical uses. We dive into the actual science behind cellular agriculture. And if you can follow all of it, it means that you’re a huge biology nerd, and I love you for it. Otherwise, it would be good just to let the science wash over you. It’s a pretty amazing topic.

Another thing we talk about is why Japanese life sciences start-ups have such a hard time both raising money and growing here in Japan. And how ShojinMeat meat has found a way to make the system work for them. But you know, Yuki tells that story much better than I can so let’s hear from our sponsor, and get right to the interview.

[pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ]

[Interview]

Tim: So I’m sitting here with Yuki Hanyu of ShojinMeat, and thanks for sitting down with me.

Yuki: Thank you very much for inviting me to the podcast.

Tim: Today we’re going to talk about meat.

Yuki: Yeah, meat.

Tim: And most specifically, cellular agriculture. So to get started. Why don’t you explain what what ShojinMeat is?

Yuki: We are a collection of volunteer students, artists, and people of various disciplines to develop cultured meat technology.

Tim: So it’s a bio-hacker community here in Tokyo, right?

Yuki: Yes.

Tim: So how long have you been doing this.

Yuki: If you’re talking about active wet novelty work, that will be about a year and a half.

Tim: Okay.

Yuki: And if you’re talking about people building a team, that would be about two and a half years.

Tim: Alright. Okay, well actually before we go forward in this, let’s step back a bit and talk about the process. So exactly how does the process work? What are you doing?

Yuki: So the basic ideas of cultures meat is quite simple. Basically you take this animal, get a few cells from that animal—It could be chicken, beef, pork—anything. You don’t even need to kill that animal. You take the few cells and then you get this into a culture medium, and grow the cells in culture medium. And at the end you get a mass of cells, which is basically meat.

Tim: Okay. Now when you say, “Any cell.” Is it really any cell or any muscle cells? Do you need stems cells or anything at all will work?

Yuki: Actually, most specifically there’s a special type of cells called myosatellite cells or myoblast cells. And those cells are so called the stem cell of muscle cells.

Tim: Okay. In your own work, are you working with cattle, or pork, or chicken, or what type of meat are you growing?

Yuki: For experiment, we’re using mostly muscles cells, and for actual foods development work, we’re using chicken now.

Tim: Chicken?

Yuki: Yes.

Tim: Okay.

Yuki: And the beauty’s the method that we discovered for mouse is actually directly applicable to chicken cells as well, and so is it for cattle, pork, or anything.

Tim: Why choose chicken? Is that simpler than beef or pork?

Yuki: Because it is easier to get the cells.

Tim: Okay, very practical reason.

Yuki: Yes.

Tim: Okay, so you grow these cells in a broth. How much time and money does it take to grow enough meat to eat? So if I wanted to grow enough for a 200-gram chicken sandwich. How much time and money would that take.

Yuki: The time would be about 20 days, but the money is the very important part—because with the current technology, it costs ridiculous amounts such as 10,000, 20,000 US dollars or something. It’s very, very expensive.

Tim: 10 to 20,000 dollars? Okay.

Yuki: Yes. And making that cheap is the most important technological hurdle.

Tim: Okay, that’s an expensive sandwich. A little later on, I want to get back to the technological hurdles, and what you’re trying to optimize to bring the costs down. But what does it taste like? Does it taste like chicken? That’s kind of a joke, but does it actually taste like chicken?

Yuki: Well, when we cooked it, it tasted like fried piece of KFC.

Tim: Okay, so you used like seasoning and—

Yuki: Yes, because you don’t eat raw meat.

Tim: Yes, that’s true. So lab grown meat, does it have a similar consistency and texture as regular meat, or is it different somehow?

Yuki: At the moment with our current limited technology, it’s just aggregative muscle cells. But in the future as the technology matures, it will be a question of what sort of meat do you want.

Tim: Excellent.

Yuki: Yeah, so you can have any texture, even any taste really.

Tim: Well, actually before we dive into the meat, I want to ask you a little bit about you. So before starting ShojinMeat, you studied at Oxford, and then at Tohoku University, and went on to as a researcher at Toshiba. And none of this had to do with cellular agriculture. So why the big change? Why leave a steady research position to start growing meat?

Yuki: Well, the idea of culturing meat has been around for longer. And for me personally, I already knew the idea when I was five or eight reading science fiction manga.

Tim: Really? Okay.

Yuki: As well as the culture meat, I was also fascinated with all the kilometers, skyscrapers, star shapes, and those things. Well, general science fiction—

Tim: Sure.

Yuki: —that a lot of young boys are into. I somehow never grew from it, and just kept going. My degree in Oxford was Chemistry, and more into organic and biological. And with that speciality, I moved into battery research. It was sort of like science fiction—as a mid-twenty-first science fiction where everywhere is covered with solar panels and renewable energy and those things.

Tim: So continuing this science fiction theme?

Yuki: Yes. After that, I realized that I actually need to study systems engineering in addition to my specialty in chemistry, battery technology—those things. That’s why I went into Toshiba research development center, system engineering laboratory, and then I came to the position of I have to choose which science fiction dream I should pursue?

Tim: Okay.

Yuki: Then I thought about my topic, chemistry more so biological. And the cultured meat is what the world needs now, so I go for that.

Tim: Okay, and it seems like something at least in Japan you pretty much have to do on your own. This isn’t a subject of research at any of the corporations or the large universities that I know of.

Yuki: It’s actually the same with any country. The cellular agriculture is not established as a discipline yet because there’s no discipline. There’s no expert. And there’s no way to fund that sort of discipline. So we have to establish that first.

Tim: Alright.

[pro_ad_display_adzone id="1653" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey” ]

Yuki: That’s what New Harvest, the leading NPO on this field, is doing.

Tim: Okay, so I’ve heard people talk about lab grown meat in terms of sustainability and cruelty to animals, but your motivation was really—it was cool and futuristic.

Yuki: Yes, and it is also—the technology it uses is actually a large scale cell culture. It has a lot more applications than cultured meat. Using the same technology, you can grow, say, kidney or liver cells. And the medical applications of that are also huge.

Tim: Okay, but I can see even in the near term the medical uses might adopt this technology much sooner than just general food because if you can grow skin for grafting or, like you said, liver cells, it’s worth a lot more money than a chicken sandwich.

Yuki: Yeah,

Tim: So you started ShojinMeat in 2015.

Yuki: Yeah.

Tim: And what does the name mean?

Yuki: Shojin actually means—it’s originally a Buddhist term.