I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the future of food, and a new technology called precision fermentation that’s going to transform it.
Humans have been taking advantage of natural fermentation for thousands of years. We enlist microbes such as yeast and bacteria, feeding them sugar and other molecules that they like. In exchange, they make molecules that we like, such as alcohol. More recently, we’ve genetically altered some microbes to produce expensive special-purpose drugs that are hard to make in any other way.
However, the advent of newer, more powerful genetic engineering technologies is making it downright easy to custom-tailor microbes to churn out almost any product we want. What will happen when we can make milk without cows, eggs without chickens, meaty proteins without livestock – or brand-new foodstuffs never before seen in nature?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
Traditional cheesemaking relies on a substance called rennet, which curdles milk so it can be separated into curds and whey. In the past, rennet was harvested from the stomachs of calves. However, since the 1990s, rennet (technically, its key enzyme, chymosin) has been made by yeast. Nearly all hard cheese is made this way.
The first use of precision fermentation is even older. In 1982, the FDA approved insulin produced by bacteria. This breakthrough replaced the old method of purifying insulin from cow and pig pancreases.
In the past, creating a genetically engineered organism was laborious and expensive. Insulin, rennet and the like were ideal because they’re high-value products only needed in small quantities.
However, new technologies like CRISPR have made genetic engineering almost trivially easy. With this power, we’re about to see an explosion of new uses. Some of them may soon be on supermarket shelves.
I read the entirety of your post on Only Sky. The comments were eye-opening–it looks like you have a multinational following.
A question about insulin: has it really been created from fermented processes since the 1980s? In the 1990s, I fostered a diabetic cat and the insulin was $10 a vial. In the 2010s, I fostered another diabetic cat and insulin was $400/vial. I’m wondering now what the costs are to create that vial of insulin? Likewise, the cost of genetic manipulation and fermentation would drive the cost of the created proteins.
Remember, in a capitalist society (as opposed to a free-market society), the price of a good is what the market will bear. Prices will rise until the returns start diminishing.
So life-saving medicines, unless government regulated, are very expensive because people have a strong desire for their relatives and pets to live.
Heme isn’t a protein; it’s a class of protein cofactors. Heme-containing proteins are hemoproteins, and are found in plants as well as animals. (I expect that they’re found in protists and prokaryotes as well, but I haven’t checked.) Leghemoglobin shares the oxygen-binding capacity and red colour of hemoglobin, though it’s function is to regular oxygen concentration in root nodules rather than to transport oxygen with the plant. The web tells me that what Impossible Foods have engineered yeast to produce is the leghemoglobin from Glycine soya.
With respect to the insulin question, the first recombinant insulin (Humulin) came onto the market in 1982 (fide Wikipedia). Modern insulins are superior to the original insulin produced as a byproduct of the pork and beef industries. Yeast-produced insulins produce the human form, rather than the porcine or bovine form; non-human insulins can provoke immune responses, including allergies. Subsequent modifications have been made to tune the pharmokinetic properties of therapeutic insulins.
The jump in prices has several causes. There is the need to amortise the development costs of the improved insulins, but there are also allegations of price-gouging. (Insulin is particularly expensive in the US.) Some insulins are out of patent, but I read that there are no generic manufacturers. In the case of veterinary insulins I could imagine that species-specific products are now available, and that these are expensive because they’re niche products under patent protection with low demand; however a web search reports that the products used for cats are based on either porcine or human insulins, so the high cost would seem to have the same cause as the high cost of insulin for human treatment.
Where I think the more “interesting” applications of such designer fermentations are is using it to make hard drugs, this has already been demonstrated with heroin, see:
https://www.nature.com/articles/251267a
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/18/home-brewed-heroin-scientists-yeast-that-can-make-sugar-into-opiates
Now imagine a world where any local brewery can pump out tons of heroin, cocaine etc.
The DEA would totally lose their mind, would we see a new era of (alcohol) prohibition?
This is an excellent observation! Making heroin from genetically modified yeast wasn’t a use that had occurred to me.
This must be a nightmare for drug prohibitionists. The technology to do this is only going to get easier and cheaper.
This also has major implications for patented pharmaceuticals. How soon before people can avoid exorbitant drug-company prices by making their own drugs in a home-brewing setup?
The human body already makes its own heroin, or at least near enough; that’s what endorphins are. And certain behaviours — ideally, those which are desirable from the point of view of species survival even when they come at some risk to the individual; I don’t know how much variation is seen in practice — gets rewarded with a small but noticeable quantity of these natural pain-relieving hormones. Which, if you are not actually in pain at the time, results in mild euphoria; the classic “warm, fuzzy feeling inside”.
And in today’s episode of “sentences you never thought anyone would utter”, helping an old lady across the road is approximately equivalent to chasing the beetle 5cm …..
Katydid@#1:
A question about insulin: has it really been created from fermented processes since the 1980s? In the 1990s, I fostered a diabetic cat and the insulin was $10 a vial
I had a similar experience. The cheap stuff was the output of modified yeasts. For reasons involving human testing, insulin for humans was obtained by extracting it from human blood. This was the 90’s – the idea that the same molecule was the same molecule regardless of origin still had not yet sunk in. (although starch from GMO potatoes is apparently different, to some people, from starch from plain old potatoes, or something like that).
It’s tempting to say something silly about how humans have come to trust assembled RNA molecules, in the form of our vaccine saviour from the pandemic except, ha ha it’s not that funny is it?
Thanks for the info, everyone!
In the early 1990s, I was told by the veterinarian that there had been species-appropriate insulin on the market, but it was pulled in favor of Humulin, which was derived from pigs and meant for humans. If I had to make a guess, it was profit-seeking choice due to a spike in human diabetes as a result of the “no fat” and vegetarian diets–plant based proteins are always higher in carbs than meat-based proteins, and in a vegetarian diet everything is either a carb (e.g. peas) or a fat (e.g. olive or avocado or coconut oils). Avoid the fat, all you’ve got left is carbs.
Anyway, back in the 1990s, I’d buy the vials of insulin from a supermarket pharmacy, and they were cheap enough that I didn’t bother getting reimbursed. A vial of insulin and a box of 100 syringes would cost me $20 together and last around 3 months. In the 2010s, the same group reimbursed me the cost of the insulin pens and screw-on needles.
One of the major issues with genetically modified food (or food processes like fermenting) is that it introduces potential new allergens into the food supply, or result in existing allergies being triggered by new foods. This can also potentially be an issue with non-food items as well, though it’s less common. It can make things harder to sort out exactly what’s causing the issue, and can also be a nightmare for those rare individuals who are prone to developing new allergies all the time. It would be nice if we had reliable ways of curing that.
Very recent article:
https://www.foodprocessing.com/ingredient-trends/article/55271987/the-promise-of-precision-fermentation
“The Promise of Precision Fermentation” – “The rapidly evolving technology can solve problems with supply chain, environmental changes and sustainability, while also creating novel ingredients.”
Also mentioning:
Onego Bio – egg-white protein
Nourish Ingredients – imitation meat and dairy fats
Oobli – sweet-tasting proteins, an alternative to sugars
TurtleTree – lactoferrin, an iron-binding protein in milk
Scaling up operations for high-volume production