Datar: Cellular agriculture research has boomed significantly since 2015
Isha Datar · Cultivated meat’s “trough of disillusionment” · Feb 27, 2025 · at 38:51
Isha Datar, executive director of New Harvest, discusses the academic growth of cellular agriculture despite the slowdown in private venture capital investment.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“There's institutes of cellular agriculture around the world, where in 2015 there was zero. There are hundreds of grad students working on cell ag research around the world, where in 2015 there was like two, you know, like I could count them on one hand.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Isha Datar
Datar: Cultivated meat may fail while lab-grown milk and eggs succeed
“Cellular agriculture as a concept is so much bigger than meat, and it's very possible that things like milk proteins or egg proteins or just ingredients in our food Are actually going to make a bigger difference for the climate and for nutrition and food and a…”
Datar: Cultivated meat startups shouldn't attempt full vertical integration early on
“If we actually think about a world where food is grown from cells, we need a really robust, diverse kind of economy behind it with many different players and so on. We can't just come out of the gate vertically integrated like the meat industry today.”
Datar: Cultivated meat is in the 'trough of disillusionment' but will happen
“We're in this kind of trough of disillusionment, as they call it in the hype cycle terminology, where people are like, what do you mean this thing will never happen, it's been way too long, when actually, it will happen, it's just, now we've kind of set oursel…”
Datar: Venture capital is improperly subsidizing basic research in emerging tech
“It's a lot easier to be a private company raising VC money to do research, which is ultimately should just be basic research, because the stuff that's going to be competitive and on the market probably can't happen until that first research happens.”
Datar: Cultivated meat regulatory approvals are investor milestones, not commercial rollouts
“I don't always know if the approvals are like the most significant thing. Like to me, they kind of read like a investor milestone more than a, oh, this is just like the last stop before we blow our product up on the market kind of thing.”
Datar: Biopharma lacks incentives to lower costs, but cell ag must
“Biopharma has set this precedent that this is what the price of things should be, and they have no incentive to bring the prices down. Cellular agriculture does have an incentive to bring the price down, and it must bring the price down.”