Aleph Farms And BioRaptor have teamed up to make use of AI to enhance the technology and reduce the price of manufacturing farmed beef.
The aim is to make use of AI to extend the efficiency of the production of cultured meat (also referred to as cultured meat). This is a type of cellular agriculture wherein meat is produced by cultivating animal cells within the laboratory.
The integration of BioRaptor's unique AI operating system into Aleph Farms' process development will underscore further scalability and value reductions within the production of Aleph Cuts as the corporate prepares for its large-scale facilities.
BioRaptor and Aleph Farms will present their innovations in respective panels on cellular agriculture and AI on the SynBioBeta conference in San Jose, California, May 6-9.
“We cannot wait one other 10,000 years for every of those treatments or latest proteins to develop. And that is where BioReactor comes into play. We enable these corporations to scale back their time to market and work rather more efficiently by taking a combined approach and collecting all different data. And thereby gaining insights to bring this technology to market at a much higher quality, in a shorter time and at a lower cost,” said Ori Zakin, CEO of BioRaptor, in an interview with VentureBeat.
Aleph Farms is a pacesetter in cellular agriculture, the primary and only company to receive regulatory approval for farmed beef. BioRaptor, pioneer in streamlining and optimizing biotechnological processes through data and AI.
“Our system allows them to iterate faster. We have machine learning and AI that may take this data, enrich it and provides corporations a rather more efficient solution to plan their latest experiments,” said Zakin. “The process they undertake is designing, constructing, measuring and learning. We’re just accelerating this learning cycle to include what we’ve learned into the following phase of design.”
This partnership will analyze the info generated during cultured meat process development and complement human intelligence in its optimization process.
Cultured meat comes from animal cell cultures and is grown in cultivators that provide controlled, clean and enclosed environments wherein cells can thrive. These cultivators constantly supply the cells with nutrients and are monitored for various process parameters comparable to pH, dissolved oxygen and temperature. Understanding the connection between cell nutrition and the cell environment is essential to defining the optimal conditions for cell growth.
“Developing cutting-edge manufacturing bioprocesses creates vast amounts of information that, when extracted, interpreted and synthesized into actionable insights, can increase productivity and reduce costs, time and human error. That is precisely our plan with Aleph Farms. By simplifying bioprocess data management and suggesting optimal experimental design, BioRaptor could enable smoother technological developments like those pioneered within the cellular agriculture industry,” said Zakin.
Zakin has a protracted history of working in technology, from cybersecurity to medical informatics. He worked in areas where the info is kind of chaotic. Most test results are scanned documents, faxes, and other unstructured data.
“We're attempting to attract biologists who don't have software engineering degrees or aren't data scientists and provides them the very best access and tools available. To provide you with direct access to your data. And so we began with the bioprocessing area,” Zakin said. “It’s a really interesting area with groundbreaking work.”
There is research into engineered yeast and bacteria, in addition to therapeutics comparable to cancer treatments.
“The commonality of all these different areas is the infrastructure that has moved from the pharmaceutical industry to the economic side and keeps going back,” Zakin said.
Integrating the BioRaptor solution into Aleph Farms' process development allows the R&D team to gather data because it is generated across multiple experiments while extrapolating each real-time and historical data.
It enables the graceful evaluation of experimental results and the configuration of all results on a single platform. The ability to review each past and present data and forecast future improvements to experiments results in greater efficiency and lower costs when scaling processes.
“Our team’s scientific expertise in design of experiment (DoE) methodology and statistical evaluation, complemented by BioRaptor’s AI-driven solution, will enable us to higher understand the interactions between different process inputs and conditions. With the massive amounts of information we generate, this capability could speed up the event of strong and scalable processes for classy meat,” Sagit Shalel-Levanon, senior director of process development at Aleph Farms, said in a press release.
“Using BioRaptor's most advanced AI and machine learning solution in our research and development will provide our team with additional support in optimizing processes for cost and scalability, and supply a solid foundation for our medium to large scale production. Our approach is to get the foundations right as we grow and avoid massive capital expenditures before our process is fully scalable,” Aleph Farms CTO Neta Lavon said in a press release. “We are investing time and resources to implement essentially the most advanced tools in our differentiated technology platform and its diverse applications within the food industry and beyond, unlocking the total potential of cellular agriculture within the emerging bioeconomy.”
Aleph Farms focuses on growing artificial beef from cow cells. Headquartered in Israel, Aleph grows cultured beef steaks that provide unique culinary experiences while improving sustainability, food safety and animal welfare.
In December 2023, the corporate received regulatory approval from the Israeli Ministry of Health for its cultured petit steak, which is raised from unmodified cells of premium Black Angus cows. Aleph Farms markets the steak under its Aleph Cuts product brand.
Founded in 2017, Aleph Farms plays a central role within the bioeconomy by diversifying supply and decentralizing the production of high-quality animal proteins and fats to enhance sustainable methods of conventional animal husbandry. The company introduced the world's first cultured thin-cut beef steak in 2018, the world's first cultured ribeye steak in 2021, and cultured collagen in 2022.
Aleph Farms has received top honors from the World Economic Forum and the United Nations for its contribution to climate leadership, including the online zero commitment made in 2020. It is supported by leading corporate partners and financial institutions in addition to government-backed sovereign wealth funds within the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
“We see cross-pollination between farmers and industry,” Zakin said. “You recognize an interchangeability.”
BioRaptor's AI-driven software platform enables biopharma, biotech and food technology corporations to speed up research, development and production. Leveraging a corporation's historical and real-time data, BioRaptor provides predictive analytics and actionable insights. It helps scientists discover, develop and scale the processes that get food and pharmaceutical products on the shelves and within the hands of the individuals who need them. Founded in 2021, BioRaptor's experienced multidisciplinary team includes leaders in pharmaceuticals, medicine, biology, data engineering and cybersecurity.
BioRaptor consists of around 10 employees, each of whom has numerous experience in numerous disciplines. They have done work that bridges engineering and biology, where analyzing plenty of data is crucial. Zakin said that the technology used to research biology is outdated and essentially the most commonly used software is Excel.
“We're attempting to develop an operating system for biology, as a brand new way of doing biology,” he said. “It’s an incredible industry. The bottom line is that biologists deserve higher infrastructure.”
