UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Cellular agriculture has quickly metamorphized from an internet curiosity to a serious policy issue, and producers and consumers in Pennsylvania and far beyond are looking for greater clarity about what this new technology might mean for their businesses and their dinner tables.
Cultured meat, a form of cellular agriculture, is meat produced by in vitro cultivation of animal cells, instead of from slaughtered animals. Cultured meat is produced using many of the same tissue engineering techniques traditionally used in regenerative medicine.
According to a team of Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences livestock experts and food scientists focused on cellular agriculture, the progress of this technology requires thorough evaluation and discussion to address the multitude of questions surrounding it. The team believes the recent agreement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to share oversight of the cellular-based meat industry is an early bit of insight.
Those two federal agencies together will regulate cell-cultured food products derived from livestock and poultry tissue based on the respective regulatory expertise of the organizations. A joint statement released last month by the two agencies said they would be working together to "foster these innovative food products and maintain the highest standards of public health."
The FDA will be in charge of regulating the collection, banking and growing of the cells used to make cell-cultured meat, while the USDA will work on the production and labeling of food products.
"A transition from FDA to USDA oversight will occur during the cell harvest stage," the statement said. "This regulatory framework will leverage both the FDA's experience regulating cell-culture technology and living biosystems and the USDA's expertise in regulating livestock and poultry products for human consumption. USDA and FDA are confident that this regulatory framework can be successfully implemented and assure the safety of these products."
The field of cell-cultured tissue production has been well-established in bioengineering and pharmaceutical production; however, the application of this technology in food production has grown exponentially since a widely publicized product taste test in 2013. Since that time, companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in cell-culture-based food production.