Israeli biotech Aleph Farms announces a partnership with the AI-powered insights platform BioRaptor to streamline and lower the costs of its cultivated meat production process by integrating cutting-edge AI technology.
Aleph Farms, the first and only company to receive regulatory approval for cultivated beef, is preparing to produce larger volumes of its products, Aleph Cuts, in Israel and Thailand. In Thailand, it will install a large-scale manufacturing plant, targeting Southeast Asia as its central hub.
Its growth approach involves strategically expanding its production capacity to ensure long-term success and minimize risks. The partnership with BioRaptor is a key part of this strategy, as it will enable the implementation of advanced tools in R&D to optimize processes before making significant infrastructure investments.
Dr Neta Lavon, CTO and co-founder of Aleph Farms, comments, “Deploying BioRaptor’s most advanced AI and machine learning solution into our R&D will provide additional support for our team to optimize processes for cost and scalability, laying a solid groundwork for our mid- to large-scale production.
“Our approach is to build the right foundations as we grow and avoid massive capital expenditure before our process is fully ready for scale.”
Understanding cells
As the company explains, cultivated meat is grown in controlled environments where cells are continuously fed nutrients and monitored for various parameters. Understanding this relationship is crucial for optimal cell growth and, thus, producing more meat.
With the integration of BioRaptor’s AI into the cultivated beef process, the R&D team gains a powerful tool. They can simultaneously collect and analyze data in real time and from past experiments, leading to more efficient evaluation of cross-experimental findings and projections. This integration significantly improves the scale up process, making it more cost-effective and time-efficient, according to the announcement.
Founded in 2021 and based in Binyamina, Israel, BioRaptor’s AI software helps biopharma, biotech, and food tech companies speed up their research and production processes to launch food and pharmaceuticals more quickly and easily.
Ori Zakin, CEO and co-founder of BioRaptor, shares, “There are massive amounts of data created during the development of state-of-the-art production bioprocesses, which, when extracted, interpreted, and collected into actionable insights, can boost productivity and reduce costs, time, and human error. This is exactly our plan with Aleph Farms.”
Realizing the potential of cell ag
Aleph Farms has reportedly raised $140 million in funding from investors, including food giant Cargill, Thai Union, and Leonardo DiCaprio. The biotech has submitted dossiers for cultivated meat approval in Switzerland and the UK and aims to expand into Singapore too, the first country to sell cultivated meat.
Lavon adds, “We are investing time and resources to implement the most advanced tools into our differentiated technology platform and its various applications in food and beyond, thereby realizing the full potential of cellular agriculture in the burgeoning bioeconomy.”
Aleph Farms and BioRaptor will present their innovations in respective panels about cellular agriculture and AI at the next SynBioBeta conference in San Jose, California.