SBIR Phase I: A low-cost, bacterial production platform for the manufacturing of high purity recombinant proteins and growth factors

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛/商业影响是引入一种具有成本效益的方法来生产重组蛋白质和生长因子的养殖肉类行业。通过培养动物细胞来制造包括肌肉和脂肪在内的动物组织，使制造商能够制造出真实的动物肉，作为动物养殖肉的替代品。用这种方法生产肉类可以提供更健康、更安全和更道德的真实的动物肉来源。这种制造过程避免了工业化的动物养殖，因此使用的土地和水显著减少。它还避免了工业化畜牧业排放的温室气体，并可能排放更少的温室气体。养殖肉类也可能导致更健康的公众，因为其受控生产可能会导致更少的食源性疾病，并避免可能滋生新疾病的工业化动物农场的拥挤条件。在几乎任何地方种植肉类的能力增加了美国食品供应链的弹性，并减少了对外国食品进口的依赖。最后，通过减少工业化动物养殖场的数量，养殖肉类减少了动物屠宰的需求。拟议的项目将展示创新的能力，以解决目前在传统蛋白质制造平台上生产重组蛋白和生长因子的几个挑战，这些平台阻碍了以更低的成本和高纯度制造。人造肉有可能颠覆价值1万亿美元的肉类产业，但获取高纯度、廉价蛋白质的能力限制了人造肉产品的商业应用。这项创新可以以比现有平台更便宜的成本生产蛋白质，因为它绕过了昂贵和耗时的操作制造步骤，同时仍然实现了高纯度。该项目的关键技术目标包括：1）建立重组生长因子生产的生产基准，并与当前的行业标准进行比较; 2）优化蛋白质生产平台所需的生长条件，以提高产量; 3）创建生产平台优化工具包，以提高可用蛋白质的质量和产量。该项目完成后获得的知识可以为促进蛋白质和生长因子高生产水平的能力和条件提供有价值的见解，同时提供与当前行业标准相比的改进数据。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to introduce a cost-effective way to produce recombinant proteins and growth factors for the cultivated meat industry. Cultivating animal cells to create animal tissues, including muscle and fat, allows manufacturers to create real animal meat as an alternative to animal-farmed meat. Producing meat in this method may provide a healthier, safer, and more ethical source of real animal meat. This manufacturing process avoids industrial animal farming and consequently uses significantly less land and water. It also avoids the greenhouse gases emitted by industrial animal farming and may emit far fewer greenhouse gases. Cultivated meat could result in a healthier public as well since its controlled production will likely result in fewer foodborne illnesses and avoid the cramped conditions of industrial animal farms that can breed new illnesses. The ability to grow meat in nearly any location increases the nation’s food supply chain resilience and reduces dependence on foreign food imports. Finally, by reducing the amount of industrial animal farms, cultivated meat reduces the need for animal slaughter.The proposed project will demonstrate the ability of the innovation to solve several challenges in the current production of recombinant proteins and growth factors in traditional protein manufacturing platforms that prevent manufacturing at lower costs and with high purity. Cultivated meat has the potential to disrupt the $1 trillion meat industry, but the ability to source high purity, cheap proteins limits the commercial adoption of cultivated meat products. The innovation could produce proteins at cheaper costs than existing platforms because it bypasses expensive and time-consuming operational manufacturing steps while still achieving high purity. The critical technical objectives of this project include: 1) the establishment and comparison of a production benchmark for recombinant growth factor production against the current industry standards, 2) the optimization of the growth conditions necessary for the protein production platform to achieve improved yields, and 3) the creation of a manufacturing platform optimization toolkit to increase the quality and amount of usable protein produced. The knowledge gained at the completion of this project may provide valuable insights into the ability and conditions to promote high production levels of proteins and growth factors while providing data illustrating the improvement when compared against current industry standards.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.