Scientists protest Italy’s ban on cultivated meat

The Italian government has approved a draft bill banning the production and commercialization of cultivated meat for human and animal consumption. The bill sets out to preserve the Italian food and culinary heritage, to protect human health and the national agri-food industry, and follows a petition launched by the national farmers’ association Coldiretti against ‘synthetic foods’ that collected nearly half a million signatures.

Cultivated meat is obtained by taking fat and muscle cells from live animals and making them grow and differentiate in a nutrient broth in a bioreactor. Researchers then use 3D scaffolds or bioprinting techniques to approximate the texture of various meat cuts. The first cultivated meat product, a hamburger, was presented in 2013 by researchers in the Netherlands. Since then, cultivated meat has been regarded as a promising tool to reduce the environmental impacts of conventional meat production and improve food security and safety.

In 2020 Singapore was the first country to authorize the commercialisation of cultivated chicken nuggets, while the Food and Drug Administration in the USA pre-approved two similar products. However, cultivated meat products are not yet authorized in the European Union. EFSA, the EU agency for food safety headquartered in Parma, has not yet received any applications for such products. Because of EU free-trade regulations, the Italian bill could not prevent the import of cultivated meat from elsewhere in Europe, should it be approved by EFSA.

Scientists say the bill, which now needs to be ratified by the Parliament, could have a negative impact on research and innovation in Italy. There is currently only one Italian start-up in the field, Bruno Cell, founded by an entrepreneur to finance the activities of two laboratories on regenerative medicine for mucles and stem cell biology at the University of Trento, led by Stefano Biressi and Luciano Conti respectively. Biressi says the bill will discourage private investors, damaging especially small and medium-sized enterprises in Italy. He doubts, for example, that the founder of Bruno Cell would have backed the project had such a regulation been in place at the time.

Alessandro Bertero, a biotechnologist at the University of Turin, shares Biressi’s concerns. Bertero obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge, and after a postdoc in the US, he came back to Italy and set up his own lab to study heart tissue development starting from induced pluripotent stem cells. “Private investments in cultivated meat startups are slowing down, particularly in the US,” Bertero says. “The first proof-of-principle projects made clear that several breakthroughs are still needed to scale up the production so that cultivated meat could become a credible alternative to conventional meat.” Bertero thinks that only governments can take the risk to support such technological advancements. “We will not succeed just by gradually adapting the techniques borrowed from regenerative medicine, we need to reinvent some processes.”

The European Union is devoting new funds to cultivated meat, through dedicated calls in his new research and innovation framework program Horizon Europe. “Cultivated meat is part of the EU’s Farm to Fork strategy and of its Green Deal, the plan to make the Union climate neutral by 2050,” explains Chiara Nitride, a researcher in food processing technologies at the University Federico II in Naples. Nitride is part of the recently launched EU project GIANT LEAPS, which focuses on alternative proteins. “My group will contribute by developing new in-vitro techniques to evaluate novel foods’ safety and nutritional values”, Nitride says, with the goal of helping companies and regulatory agencies generate and assess the data that will be required in order to approve new foods.

“From a nutritional point of view, cultivated meat could be more suitable to substitute conventional meat in our diets than plant-based alternatives”, Nitride says. It could also be safer than its conventional counterpart, she says, reducing the need for antibiotics, although a thorough safety assessment will be needed. Nitride is hopeful that Italian researchers will be able to continue their activities thanks to European funds.

Pierdomenico Perata, a professor of plant biology at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, is less optimistic. He says the new bill is synonymous with the EU’s ban, 20 years ago, on GMO cultivation, when Italy also prohibited open field trials of such crops. “Research on GMOs doesn’t exist anymore in Italy, while we still import million tonnes of genetically modified soy every year to produce animal feed”.

According to Perata the ban on cultivated meat could be even more disruptive because it hits a less mature research field. “We are abandoning not only innovation, but also the possibility of having the tools to make decisions [on these products] when the time comes,” he says.