Tokyo, Japan, February 2, 2023 − IntegriCulture, a cellular agriculture company developing the leading infrastructure platform for growing products like meat, fat, cosmetics ingredients, fur and leather from cells instead of animals, is conducting a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to quantify the environmental benefits of cultured meat produced via its proprietary technology, the CulNet system.

Compared to conventional meat harvested from farmed livestock, cultured meat is expected to be less resource intensive, emit fewer greenhouse gases, and provide a climate-friendly protein source for a growing global population. Cultured meat can only be a climate solution, however, if it is cheap to produce.

Since its founding in 2015, IntegriCulture has been developing an inexpensive method of growing all species of cultured meat without the external addition of costly growth factors. This method is the CulNet system, which IntegriCulture is now ready to test the economic feasibility and technical performance of in partnership with The University of Shiga Prefecture and AIZOTH.

Together, the three institutions will verify the potential environmental impact of the CulNet system when implemented into society. They will do so using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA). IntegriCulture will provide data from the CulNet system, The University of Shiga Prefecture will use said data to calculate LCA and TEA indicators, and AIZOTH will use AI technology to evaluate CulNet cultured meat if mass produced.

The results of this research will help policymakers with carbon pricing for both conventional and cultured meat, the goal being to encourage meat companies to change their behavior and embrace cellular agriculture to decarbonize meat production.

Research outline:
Research:
Establishment of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) methods for cultured meat production
Research Objective:
To establish LCA and TEA indices and analysis methods for cultured meat produced via the CulNet system versus harvested from industrially farmed livestock.
Research period:
One year from November 1, 2022 to October 31, 2023

Participating organizations:

The University of Shiga Prefecture
The University of Shiga Prefecture is a public university with 13 departments in four faculties and four graduate schools with nine divisions, where students can learn everything from humanities and social sciences to natural sciences. Since its opening, the university has focused on enhancing practical education under the motto " Our campus is Lake Biwa and our text is Humanity.”

AIZOTH
AIZOTH provides AI analysis and LCA technical consulting for the R&D field using Multi-Sigma, a no-code, SaaS-type AI analysis tool that can be used by "anyone, anywhere, on any hardware" to increase R&D efficiency by 100 and more fold in some cases. Using deep learning to perform predictions, factor analysis, and multi-objective optimizations from the minimum necessary experimental data, AI searches for optimal manufacturing conditions that simultaneously satisfy numerous objectives from among a vast number of combinations of manufacturing conditions. AIZOTH is the world’s leading company in the development of the ex-ante LCA method, which estimates the cost and environmental impact of a future large-scale commercialization of a technology based on information from the R&D phase.

IntegriCulture
IntegriCulture is the cellular agriculture company responsible for developing the CulNet system, a proprietary cell culture technology which provides a platform for growing food, materials, leather, and more. The CulNet system simulates and mimics the interactions between organs in an animal body. IntegriCulture’s technology is capable of culturing animal cells on a large scale at low cost, and the company is currently conducting research on its use in various applications including cultured meat. To date, IntegriCulture has achieved in-house production of growth factors (serum-like components), the biggest cost driver of cultured meat. IntegriCulture is currently accelerating efforts toward producing cultured foie gras.

Media contact:
IntegriCulture PR Team
pr@integriculture.com