I define myself as… a future farmer, dedicated to saving the world… one cow at a time!
Who is Sebastiano?
I am a Junior Scientist in the Fat Team at Mosa Meat, where we focus on cultivating delicious fat, the absolut protagonist in bringing that juicy and tasty mouthfeel to your bite. I am also part of the sustainability team with the goal of using less plastic and more glassware in the lab and I have an active role in the tasting committee!
What is your story?
After graduating from a MSc program in Regenerative Medicine in Maastricht University (The Netherlands) I promised myself I would have never seen myself living in this city again (said laughing). Later on, I started working in Milan for a consulting firm in the pharmaceutical industry and realized that money isn’t everything. If I had to spend more than 8 hours a day working, I wanted to do something meaningful and be part of projects with a positive impact on the world we live in. For this reason, I understood that Mosa Meat was the right place for me as it brings together my three passions: food, science and nature.
What characterizes Mosa Meat?
The founder Mark Post is a medical doctor who was doing research on stem cells to regenerate heart tissues, with his knowledge and experience he started asking himself “why not using this technology to recreate meat for humans?”.
Mosa Meat is a food tech company based in Maastricht that is mastering the technology of cultivating beef using non-GMO cells. They were the first ones to demonstrate the potential of this technology by making the first cultivated burger in 2013 (although it was just a demonstration, not a product, as the price to produce that burger was around 250.000 euros).
Other companies typically use GMO cells as they are a lot easier to handle from a bioprocess perspective: from a single biopsy you can select specific cells and make them “immortal”, allowing you to use them over and over again in a much more predictable way. At Mosa, we believe in an organic approach as it will help us to develop a more robust technology and achieve consumer acceptance faster.
There is a fast growing number of companies worldwide that are doing research on cultured meat. Some examples are the Dutch company “Meatable”, which is developing cultivated pork and the American “Eat Just” that is already selling cultivated chicken in Singapore.
What is the technology behind cultivated meat?
It all starts with a cow. We take a small sample of cells (about the size of a peppercorn), select the best stem cells and nurture them by replicating the growth process that takes place as the animal grows. We provide our cells with lots of nutrients, vitamins, an adequate climate and fresh air.
Once we start with the production batch we let cells do what they do best: grow. This is called the proliferation phase and in a few days one single cell can grow into millions of cells. Stem cells are undifferentiated, which means they aren’t yet specialized (instead muscle cells are specialized to contract). By recreating the right environment and providing specific nutrients we can give them the right “instructions” to differentiate and become either muscle or fat cells. This is the second part of the process: the differentiation phase. When mature, we can “harvest” what we “cultivated” and by putting the two parts together the result is meat! It is surprisingly simple.
For this reason, we define ourselves as “future farmers”. From one tiny sample from a cow, you can get as many as 80.000 burgers. This shows how useless it is to keep on slaughtering animals.
How is the company structured?
There are many teams that constantly work together to make this magic happen. Some examples are the “muscle team“, in charge of developing the muscle cells into tissues with the right structure, the “medium development team“, that studies and creates the nutrients to feed
cells. Another one is the “bioprocess development team“, focusing on upscaling to a production process what we can currently make in the lab (making 1 burger is one thing, making a ton of them is something else). Lastly, as part of the “fat team“, I focus on developing a better product by making our fat delicious, juicy and possibly even “better”, for example containing no antibiotics, less cholesterol or more vitamins.
What challenges is Mosa Meat facing?
There are several challenges that we focus on every day. First of all, there is a need for better and more suitable technologies, such as the bioreactors that we currently use to cultivate meat come from the pharmaceutical industry, being more expensive and too sophisticated for cellular agriculture. Secondly, the nutrients needed to feed the cells are usually pharma-grade and produced in small quantities, far from ideal when setting up a production process. Moreover, many of these components that are used in R&D are not edible or animal-free, so we are constantly searching for more suitable alternatives from natural origins which can be consumed by humans.
Lastly, and most importantly, consumer acceptance will be one of the most important challenges. Taste and price will be pivotal to obtain a shift in consumption and help people consume less meat.
What is a typical day at Mosa Meat?
First of all, there is not a typical day at Mosa!
However, ideally it would be something like this:
I usually work from home in the morning analyzing data coming from ongoing experiments. Then I would plan the upcoming experiments and projects after meeting with the gang (my team). It’s not unusual to have crossover projects with other teams too!
Communication and cooperation between each team is fundamental: the more complex the challenge, the more teams take part in it. Following, I usually join the team in the lab to check on the (baby) cells, see if they are happy and growing fat or if they need anything. My favorite days are when I can “harvest” the fat that has differentiated and matured, collect it and actually cook it in our kitchen to taste the result (it’s so good!)
How does it feel to work on a product that is not on the market yet?
I honestly don’t think about it too much. Actually, as we are developing a new product, I feel like we have more freedom while designing it. Our CEO says that we are like the Pilgrims that arrived in North America, exploring uncharted territories. It is both fascinating and frustrating at the same time, as there are many questions we don’t have the answers to. I wish there was an exchange of knowledge between the scientists in this industry as few people have experience in this sector, unfortunately companies feel threatened by eachothers and all the information is kept confidential