Editor’s note: Prof. Yaakov Nahmias and his company Future Meat were recently featured in the news story “World’s first lab-grown meat production facility, based on HU research, to open next year”. In this two-part podcast series, he discusses how he’s helping to advance medical research, drug discovery and production of new medicines in ‘Tissue Dynamics’; followed by insight into his inspiration from the human body’s filtration and purification system in ‘The Future of Cultured Meat Production.’
In this episode of the FYI—For Your Innovation podcast, we welcome Professor Yaakov Nahmias from the Hebrew University. Yaakov is an Israeli bioengineer and an award-winning, industry-leading expert in his fields, who has worked in 3D printing and cellular research for the majority of his career. This two-part conversation will cover his work at Tissue Dynamics in the field of drug discovery and the production of cost-effective cultured meat at Future Meat Technologies.
In this first part, we explore how Professor Nahmias is helping to advance medical research, drug discovery, and production of new medicines. We hear about his ideas that led to the founding of his company, Tissue Dynamics, and some of the problems that the company aims to fix. Professor Nahmias does a great job of explaining the complex issues of drug discovery. We discuss technological advancements, such as smart organ-on-chip technology, that could allow us to reduce the time it takes to find new drugs. For this and more, tune in!
Key Points From This Episode:
- How Yaakov’s engineering background and philosophy led him to drug discovery
- The underlying climate that brought about the birth of Tissue Dynamics
- Reasons for the steep price increase of bringing a new drug to market
- How Yaakov has focused on trying to alleviate bottlenecks for drugs coming to market
- Technological advancements that have allowed progress in the field
- The smart organ-on-chip platform that Tissue Dynamics has built to track studies in real-time
- How Tissue Dynamics is interpreting the massive amounts of data it processes
- What Yaakov sees in the near future of health care and drug development
Tweetables:
“It turns out that a lot of the things that we find in mice don’t really translate and there’s many reasons for that. One is that mice have very different genetics to humans.” — Yaakov Nahmias
“A few years more of organ-on-chip research needs to happen before very reliable models can be used to study human immunology. But it’s there and it is definitely right there at the cutting edge.” — Yaakov Nahmias
Today’s episode is part two of the discussion with Professor Yaakov Nahmias, the Israeli biomedical engineer and innovator. We discuss his startup, Future Meat Technologies, a company funded by Tyson Foods, which is poised to develop the next generation of cultured meat.
Initially when someone proposed the idea of cultured meat to him, Yaakov thought it would be too expensive. Drawing inspiration from the human body’s filtration and purification system, Future Meat Technologies is working on a bioreactor which removes the growth inhibiting ammonia from the cell growth process. With this breakthrough development, the company has a plan to drastically drive down the cost of cultured meat production and improve efficiency to the point where it could surpass the output of the conventional meat industry. This may not only feed more people, but also allow consumers to make more conscious decisions. Yaakov recognizes that it is a niche market and in order to widen the customer base it is important to make the product as close to conventional meat as possible.
Key Points From This Episode:
- An explanation of what cultured meat is
- Meat is made up of muscle and fat, so to mimic the taste in cultured meat, only fat is needed
- What fibroblasts are and why Yaakov’s company favors using them over other cells
- Why this new way of producing meat can be cheaper than using a conventional bioreactor
- How Future Meat Technologies’ purifying device works
- Why this way of producing meat is not genetically modified
- Why this technology’s shorter time frame allows for a higher level of market responsiveness
- What the most popular items in the meat market currently are
- What Yaakov envisions the future cultured meat industry to look like
Tweetables:
“It turns out that a lot of the things that we find in mice don’t really translate and there’s many reasons for that. One is that mice have very different genetics to humans.” — Yaakov Nahmias
“A few years more of organ-on-chip research needs to happen before very reliable models can be used to study human immunology. But it’s there and it is definitely right there at the cutting edge.” — Yaakov Nahmias