New production facility in Singapore for Pioneer Avant cell cultured fish – vegconomist

Having recently been named one of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Tech Pioneers’, Hong Kong-based fish cell culture pioneer Avant has announced the opening of a new production facility in Singapore.

By joining forces with A*STAR’s Bioprocessing Technology Institute, a joint farmed fish bioprocessing research laboratory in Biopolis, Singapore will be established. The research collaboration will advance the scale-up of Avant’s proprietary process to enable cost-effective, food-grade production of cell-cultured fish.

By jointly developing and optimizing solutions for the scalable production of cultured fish cells, Avant is taking another step in its strategic development and commercialization process. The company is the first company in Asia to develop technologies for fish cell culture and has introduced several commercial products, including the world’s first functional cell-based collagen. The company also recently announced a strategic partnership with VHC, one of the largest fishing companies in the world.

Accelerate breakthroughs

As the first nation in the world to approve the sale of cell culture meat, Singapore is at the center of cell culture meat R&D, but the regulatory wheels are also in motion in other countries, such as the United States. and Qatar. A recent report identified 23 new cell culture meat companies launched in 2020, with $366 million raised in the same period – a 6X increase.

Ms. Carrie Chan, co-founder and CEO of Avant, said, “Building on Avant’s existing experiences in fish cell culture and A*STAR’s expertise in bioprocessing , the collaboration will accelerate breakthroughs in methods for optimizing the cell culture process for meat production. It will achieve process efficiency and cost reduction initially for fish cells. We expect to gain insight into methodologies that can potentially be applied to other cell types as well.