Aleph Farms' aim is to produce non-genetically modified food, which means using natural processes to grow meat to mimic the way it would develop in a cow.
Created: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2022-10-17
Company - Aleph Farms
Service - Space meat
- Classification
- In-Space Manufacturing
- Category
- In-Space Manufacturing
- Fields
- Food for Space
- Status
- 2) Demonstrated
- First launch
- 2019
- Partners
- 3D Bioprinting Solutions
Cells were taken from cows. Next, the small-scale muscle-tissue was placed under zero-gravity conditions and assembled in a 3D bioprinter. The technique could be used to feed astronauts in the space station in the future.
"In space, we don’t have 10,000 or 15,000 litres of water available to produce 1kg of beef," said Mr Toubia. “We are proving that cultivated meat can be produced anytime, anywhere, in any condition.”
Together with research partner at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, Aleph Farms has successfully cultivated the world’s first slaughter-free ribeye steak, using three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting technology and natural building blocks of meat — real cow cells, without genetic engineering and immortalization. With this proprietary technology developed just two short years after we unveiled the world’s first cultivated thin-cut steak in 2018 which did not utilize 3D bioprinting, we now have the ability to produce any type of steak and plan to expand our portfolio of quality meat products.
Unlike 3D printing technology, our 3D bioprinting technology is the printing of actual living cells that are then incubated to grow, differentiate, and interact, in order to acquire the texture and qualities of a real steak.
Aleph Farms experiment was selected to be part of ‘Rakia’ Mission to space, led by the Ramon Foundation and the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology. One of 44 experiments to be chosen, it will be launched to the International Space Station as part of Axiom Space Ax-1 Mission, pending NASA and Axiom approval, together with the second Israeli in space, Eytan Stibbe, at the beginning of 2022. This will be Aleph Farms’ second trip to space, following a successful ISS experiment in 2019. In this new experiment we will focus on tackling the challenge of cultivating the cells in microgravity. Aleph’s space program, Aleph Zero, builds upon our mission to produce quality meat locally, even in the most remote places on Earth with minimal natural resources. When people live on the Moon or Mars, Aleph Farms will be there as well.
Israeli foodtech startup Aleph Farms is a leader in the cultured lab-processed meat industry where it uses cow cells to produce meat in a lab, and has previously launched an experiment to space in 2019. Its experiment will test the potential of pluripotent stem cell differentiation of cattle and the formation of muscle tissue embedded in hydrogel, where astronauts will examine the rate of cell division in microgravity, and attempt to grow cow cells for cultured meat in space. Aleph Farms has partnered with SpacePharma, Indian Space Applications Centre, European space agencies, and scientific high tech startup accelerators.
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