Agrenvec is a plant biotech company working in the field of molecular farming: it refers to the production in plants, traditionally used in agriculture, of proteins or other metabolites valuable to medicine or industry. Supported by twenty years of experience in the field, a wide portfolio of recombinant proteins, including human growth factors and cytokines, structural proteins, enzymes, etc. has been developed.
Cultivated meat aims to become an alternative to the traditional meat production process, cultivating animal cells in bioreactors instead of farming and slaughtering animals. This cell-based meat, free of animal cruelty and exploitation, will be more environmentally friendly, dramatically reducing carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emissions and land and water use, compared to intensive livestock farming.
A significant bottleneck to the scale-up of animal cell culture is the cost of culture media, due mainly to the essential need for growth factors, and a reduction in costs is needed to provide a product similar in terms of price to conventional farm origin meat. Advantages of using plant-made animal growth factors may be a key point to make scaled production of cultivated meat economically viable and to reach price competitiveness.
Agrenvec’s extensive experience in routinely producing animal-free, endotoxin free, recombinant proteins in plants, provides tailor made solutions for innovators in cultivated meat. Optimized beef, chicken, pork or fish growth factors can be produced on demand.
