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In vitro cultured meat: no cows needed by Dick Peterson Special to The Catalyst He can do it. The technology exists. He can assemble the team of scientists who can make it happen, probably within the next five years. But nobody wants it badly enough to put up the millions of dollars in venture capital Vladimir Mironov, M.D., says it will take to produce in vitro cultured meat. That’s meat that never did moo, baa, oink, cluck or quack. It never chewed a cud or pecked the ground, and it certainly never experienced the horrors of a slaughterhouse. It’s edible, nutritious meat grown in a laboratory with the potential to feed the world’s hungry, to open long distance space travel by making in-flight food production a reality, and to ensure a national food supply safe from bioterrorism.   “I have everything in place, but I have no demand,” Mironov said. “Unless you have demand, and that means money, you cannot do research.”   Dr. Vladimir Mironov, Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, displays a vial of turkey myoblast cells which, under the right conditions, can assemble themselves into skeletal muscle tissue, an important item at Thanksgiving dinner. It’s not that Mironov would have it any other way. It’s simply the reality of biomedical research. It’s been a few months now since national news media descended on MUSC to hear Mironov explain how skeletal muscle cells cloned from livestock can be grown. If they can be grown in the laboratory, they can be grown on an industrial scale to produce hamburger-like meats with precisely controlled fat and protein content.   Mironov said that the media attention—CBS ran a spot on its Evening News Nov. 25—was not something he sought, and he now knows he could have done well without the publicity it generated.   It began with a grant offering totaling $2 million that Mironov was told included food production. “So I built a team,” he said. “One was Dr. Douglas McFarland from North Dakota, who has already defined cell lines from domestic edible animals. The second was John Vournakis from Marine Polymer Technologies who has purified chitosan from algae, which is edible. Some people use it to reduce fat. Number three was Anna Gutowska, who can produce expandable polymers from collagen and chitosan, which is also edible. The polymers create a kind of fitness center to exercise the cells.” He explained that skeletal cells attached to a structure will fuse and form and require the mechanical conditioning provided by an expandable chitosan scaffold.   “My job was to pull the team together and create a bioreactor,” Mironov said.   The grant never materialized. Other attempts to obtain funding from both commercial and federal sources failed to rouse any interest in Mironov’s proposals, “So I tried to forget about it,” he said.   But while disinterested funding sources encouraged him to forget, emerging media attention seemed to be taking on a life of its own with an apparent obsession to keep the memory alive. Especially intriguing to one reporter was the notion that in vitro cultured meat just might lure vegetarian taste buds to their forbidden fruit. If not hamburger, why not take a biopsy of her muscle tissue and grow it, she offered.   “I’m not a U.S.-licensed M.D., I told her, and I don’t want to participate in high-tech cannibalism,” Mironov said. “And I think it is a very bad marketing tool.”   One foundation which does not like animal killing contributed a relative pittance to the idea and demanded results.   “So they want me to publish a paper, but I could not publish a paper that I create hamburger. I have no data,” Mironov said. What he could do, he said, was publish a conceptual paper about how it could be done.   Despite refusals from legitimate funding sources and Mironov’s reluctance to deal with fringe groups whose money offers were meager at best, word of his proposal to produce lab-grown meat captured one imagination after another, including that of Jason Matthew. Matthew, a student in Maryland, built a Web site promoting the same idea that Mironov repeatedly portrayed as dated technology put to a new use, meat production instead of growing organs for transplant.   The president of the tissue engineering society Mironov belongs to refused to call his concept tissue engineering, but a member of the society’s board, who advocates expanding the field and is editor of the society’s journal, gave it the push it needed to be published.   “And what’s happened. Unbelievable,” Mironov said. “The media hype. BBC. CBS Evening News. They make a movie, and it’s all show, because I haven’t done a thing. All this from four years ago.”   For a few days the media requests came in, demanding that Mironov accommodate them and Mironov half expecting the publicity just may spark interest and better yet shake loose some capital to get him started on this new end product for tissue engineering.   But before the dust could settle, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. As quickly as they arrived, the media left, leaving a measure of destruction in their wake.   “It was all show, because I am not doing anything, actually. They get all this information and then nothing.” He said the experience has left him embarrassed and has made him look like all he wanted was publicity. The CBS Evening News spot featuring Mironov aired on Thanksgiving Day in the Western time zones but was preempted in the East by televised football games.   Despite the huge commercial potential for tissue engineering, a potential apart from organ transplantation, Mironov realizes that without a demand that spawns venture capital he cannot proceed. “I decided that if I received just one call from a venture capitalist, then we have demand. But not one call. And that for me was most disappointing, because I have put my reputation on the line and I am suffering from all this media hype.   “At least I can create an awareness about this technology.” Mironov said that food is but one spin-off from tissue engineering. Leather is another. And clothing. And what is fur, but skin with hair, he asked. All it takes is demand, money and someone to do it. Meanwhile Mironov will focus all his energy on his first passion, bio-printing. That’s using printing processes to build human organs for transplant. It’s research in its infancy, but like the vision he has for cultured meat, Mironov has a vision creating organs for transplant.   He said he takes heart from Harvard researcher and specialist in anticancer antiangiogenic therapy Judah Folkman who told his audience at a lecture at MUSC, “If you live long enough and stick to your original message again and again, then people start to listen and finally understand you.”    “Folkman introduced his concept of antiangiogenic anticancer therapy in 1971 and was originally treated as a charlatan,” Mironov said. “In 2004, the first FDA-approved antiangiogenic drug for the treatment of cancer generated a billion dollars for Genentech, the company that developed it.”   Mironov strongly believes that tissue engineered meat, “charlem,” as he calls it, is inescapably part of humanity’s future. As he put it, “It is a matter of social demand and not so much a matter of technology. Incubation time for commercial exploitation of a new technological idea is difficult to predict. The only way to predict the future is to build it.   “What makes me very excited,” Mironov said, “is I am Russian, but I am now in the process of inventing new English words. I invented (the words) organ printing, bio-printing, bio-ink. And now a name for tissue engineered hamburger—“charlem.” I name it for Charleston, because I love it here and em for engineered meat. What do you think?”     Friday, Jan. 20, 2006 Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. Catalyst Online editor, Kim Draughn, can be reached at 792-4107 or by email, catalyst@musc.edu. Editorial copy can be submitted to Catalyst Online and to The Catalyst in print by fax, 792-6723, or by email to catalyst@musc.edu. 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