South Africa's Immozyme, in collaboration with a government-owned research organisation, has successfully scaled up the production of a key growth factor to reduce the cost of farmed meat.
In a major breakthrough for the domestic alternative protein sector, South Africa's Immozyme has successfully produced a growth factor for large-scale farmed meat.
The Stellenbosch-based startup is working with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), a unit of the federal government's Department of Science and Innovation.
Together, they have scaled up production of fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF-2) for cultured meat in a 50-litre bioreactor, a first for the country.
“This is a major achievement for CSIR, and it opens the door to other innovative and unique technologies for localization, especially others such as fibroblast growth factors and insulin growth factors,” said CSIR biotechnology expert Veshara Ramadoss.
How Imozyme and CSIR developed their growth factor
“Companies that specialize in cell-cultured meat take a single cell from a cow, or a fish, or a chicken. They take it to the lab and then they make that one cell become multiple cells and ultimately, those multiple cells become a food product,” said Nick Enslin, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Immozyme.
The startup approached CSIR with a genetically modified bacterial strain to produce FGF-2, a commercial protein that signals mammalian cells to multiply and proliferate. Growth factors are added to the mix to direct and maintain meat growth.
Although they are essential for the production of farmed meat, they are traditionally very expensive and account for the large portion of culture media costs.
Ramdas explained that his team had envisioned an excellent business case for scaling up the production process of Immobzyme at the CSIR Biomanufacturing Industry Development Center (BIDC). Its task was to create a cost-effective, efficient process using precision microbiology and bioreactors.
Scientists at the organization established sterile and stable conditions to ensure that only genetically modified E. coli containing the target protein as well as the imoenzyme were growing in the bacterial culture. The culture starts in a petri dish, grows in a flask with ideal nutrients, and is then transferred into a bioreactor with precisely controlled parameters such as temperature and nutrient levels.
“When we harvest the bioreactor, that entire broth goes through a separation process,” Ramdas said. The liquid component is separated from the E. coli biomass, and then the FGF-2 protein is extracted and purified.
“Our product is intracellular based, so we have to break open or break those cells in a process of mechanical disruption,” she said.
The broken E. coli are then removed from the mixture by centrifugation, which forces the heavier cell material to sink to the bottom while the target protein remains in a clear liquid on top. This clarified lysate is then purified, yielding pure FGF-2 protein powder that is ready for cell culture in the farmed meat industry.
Immozyme plans to further scale up CSIR facility
The scale-up process was supported by funding from the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Technology Innovation Agency as part of the Biomanufacturing Industry Development Programme.
According to Enslin, the industrial insights and training gained from CSIR collaboration are invaluable to business. “BIDC is an incredible facility; it's a world-class facility,” he said.
“But I would almost say that beyond the facility, the equipment and the machinery, there was a flow of ideas; it was a collaborative effort,” he said.
The startup is now hoping to scale up FGF-2 manufacturing along with other proteins and products in its pipeline. It will continue to utilize the larger facilities at CSIR to boost its production.
“At the end of the day, we got a commercially viable product through this relationship, which is really cool to see,” Enslin said.
“The fact that Imozyme has created a unique and innovative formulation that they have developed and produced this FGF-2 in a cost-effective manner puts them in a competitive position compared to what is available internationally,” Ramdas said.
Cultured meat is a budding industry in South Africa, with only a few startups, such as Nuform Foods And WildBio. They operate in a continent whose population expected to almost double to 2.5 billion by 2050, with an increase demand for meat.
With food security a major risk for many countries in the region, farmed meat can help meet that demand locally and with fewer risks.
