Career-Calling

Bio-Process Engineer, Cellular Agriculture - Learn how Cellular Agriculture is changing the way food & other animal products are produced

• Pratibha Pandit • Season 1

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Is sustainable food production your calling? Hear from Will Paton, a Bio-Process Engineer and an early member in Cellular Agriculture field, about the science of growing animal products in lab.


Humans and animals go a long way in history. Humans have relied on animals for companionship as well as for materialistic needs, such as food, clothing, and many other animal products. With the increasing demand for animal products, the industry of large scale animal farming has also grown, raising concerns about its impact on the environment and sustainability. In response, scientists and innovators have been seeking more sustainable methods to meet the global animal product demand. Today, we will learn about one such industry that has gained momentum in recent years. Cellular agriculture that uses biotechnology to create animal products without the need to raise and slaughter animals. This is career calling. And I'm your host. My guest today is Will Paton. A bioprocess engineer who will share with us the fascinating world of cellular agriculture and his career journey as an engineer. Will holds an undergraduate degree in bioengineering with a major in molecular biology from Santa Clara university and has been an early member of this emerging industry with with his stints at cellular agriculture startups, Mission Barns, and Prolific Machines as process engineer. hi, Will. Welcome to Career-Calling.

Will Paton:

Hi, Pratibha. Thank you for having me

Pratibha Pandit:

So you are in an industry that is set to revolutionize the way food is produced. Now, a lot of us are kind of familiar, or at least at the outset, we know how in the traditional agriculture the food is produced. But a lot of us don't know how food is produced in a lab. What does it mean to grow meat in a lab? So let's start from there. So tell us how is food produced in lab?

Will Paton:

Yeah. So with cellular agriculture, we are growing animal cells to make meat. And first we have to start off by getting a sample of animal cells to grow outside of the animal. And this has actually been done for over a hundred years. Cell culture, it has been done for a really long time for research purposes. So what you do is you take a biopsy from a living animal. A small sample of tissue and it can be from any part of the animal depending on what type of cells you want to get. So for our purposes, for cellular agriculture, we're focusing on making meat. So we want cells like muscle cells and fat cells. So we take a sample of those cells and then to grow them outside of the animal, we have to try to replicate the physiological environment that those cells grow in inside of an animal. So two of the really important things we try to replicate outside of the animal are the temperature and the pH that the cells are grown in. And so we have incubators that control the temperature and pH of the environment and then we also have to provide food for the cells to consume so that they can grow and divide. And so we provide this cocktail that we call cell culture media. And it's a combination of amino acids, salts, sugars, vitamins, minerals, and the cells can consume all of these nutrients and use them to make energy so that they can grow and divide.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm.

Will Paton:

so most cell culture that's done like this is done in very small scales in little petri dishes and little multi-well plates in research laboratories. And that's not enough cells to make meats. So what we're trying to do is grow as many cells as we can so that we can grow enough cells to actually make a meat product.

Pratibha Pandit:

So is it right assumption then if you want to grow chicken meat, you'll take biopsy from, you know, chicks and then if it is beef, it is. Is, is that how it is?

Will Paton:

Exactly. Yeah. And so the cool part about it is that you could take a biopsy from an animal that you have on a farm and grow its cells and say, make a steak or a burger out of those cells, and the animal that the cells came from could still be walking around in the farm completely happy and healthy, and you don't have to kill it.

Pratibha Pandit:

Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool. Is now, is meat production the only form of application or are there other types of foods you know, produced using cell culture?

Will Paton:

Yeah. So I think meat is the main focus for most companies in the cellular agriculture space right now. But there are a couple other applications. If we kind of think about what types of things do we use on a day-to-day basis that come from traditional animal agriculture. One of the big ones that we probably all interact with a lot is leather. It comes from the skin of animals that are used for food production often times. so there's a company in the Bay Area called Vitro Labs that's making leather from cell culture

Pratibha Pandit:

amazing.

Will Paton:

There's another company also in the Bay Area that's making collagen and so that's produced usually using byproducts of meat production like bones and cartilage and things like that. And so it can actually be used in cellular agriculture for meat. We sometimes use collagen to provide a surface for cells to grow on, but it's also used in cosmetics. So right now there are cosmetics on the market already that use this collagen that's produced from cellular agriculture.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Now, that's a good point that you know, a lot of the common population, people do not know how the actual traditional meat gets produced, what happens to animals, and all the reach it has in all the different products, from cosmetics to food to everywhere else. Now, agriculture has been there as you know, as long as the human history has existed, humans have been farming animals. How is this industry, what is the premise on which this industry emerged and, you know, the importance of this?

Will Paton:

Yeah. So you're absolutely right. Farming has been around for almost as long as humanity, as long as we've been doing any type of agriculture. And it's the outputs of farming are totally ingrained in our day-to-day life. But unfortunately, traditional animal agriculture really uses a lot of resources. So some of the big ones are water. There's a lot of water that has to go into making meat and milk and things like that. And it also takes up a lot of land, partly for allowing animals to graze but also partly for growing feedstock to feed animals. And so because it requires so much land, animal agriculture has been a big source of deforestation, especially in the, an Amazon rainforest. And so it, it's not really sustainable. And one of the crazy facts that I learned when I was learning about this is that meat consumption or at least demand for meat is expected to double from 2008 to 2050, and we just don't have enough natural resources to support production of that much meat. So lots of people have been thinking about how to solve this issue for a long time. It's kind of a food security issue, but there's also an animal welfare issue, right? We're not really treating these animals well. So cellular agriculture is one approach to replace or supplement traditional animal agriculture. But there's other companies and other industries that have been around for even longer than cellular agriculture. They're also seeking to do similar things that we are. So I think a great example. Plant-based substitutes for meat and dairy. These have been around for a long time and they've definitely gotten a lot of adoption from consumers. But with what we are doing for cellular agriculture is we can truly make real meat. It's just grown outside the animal, so, That's kind of our approach is to provide another alternative that might be closer to what you'd expect from a steak or a burger or a chicken breast that actually comes from a real chicken.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Now, you talked about the supply needs that are going to double that I would imagine the worldwide, right? When food is, like meat is produced in labs, how accessible it is, like affordability in terms of, you know, accessibility to different parts of the world, not just the developed countries. How, how are the economies of that?

Will Paton:

Yeah, so that's one of the big challenges that we have to solve as an industry. Right now it's really expensive and many companies have made really big strides to reduce the cost. Including the company I work for Prolific Machines. But it's important to think about where we came from. So the first burger that was ever made from cellular agriculture cost$300,000 to make which is not accessible to anyone, whether you're in a developed country or a developing country. But based on. Some estimations that lots of different people have made. It seems realistic that we can get to a cost that's either at or lower than conventional meat. And I think a big part of that is because it's a much more efficient process than producing conventional meat. It's about 30 times more efficient for beef to produce it via cellular agriculture than through traditional agriculture. And that's just in terms of the number of calories you have to put in to get one calorie out.

Pratibha Pandit:

Now based on my very high level research, it sounds like the industry has companies that are producing meat, companies that are producing equipments to produce meat, and then there are end consumers, the food supply chains that are the buyers. Help me expand on that what are the different, you know, who are the different players in the ecosystem? What are the different types of you know work happening in this field?

Will Paton:

Yeah, so the majority of companies right now are trying to produce meat products in this industry. So taking a biopsy and going through the whole production process to produce some sort of meat product at the end. But, there's so many inputs that go into making a product from start to finish. There are lots of companies that have cropped up to either make equipment or ingredients or other things like that that will feed into this ultimate production process. So there are some companies making bioreactors, which are the special piece of equipment that we use to grow cells. There are companies that are making new types of cell culture media to feed the cells in a cheaper way or a way that makes the cells grow faster and they're also companies making different types of materials for cells to grow.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. You are a Bio-Process Engineer. You studied Bioengineering, with a major in Molecular Biology. What is the role of a bioprocess engineer? What do they do?

Will Paton:

Yeah. So as a Bio-Process engineer, I focus on how do we scale up our production process and translate it from a small scale experiment that we're doing in the lab to a large scale manufacturing process. And then how do we make that process as efficient as possible? So I do a lot of different things to kind of support that. I do small scale experiments in the lab. Develop a process that we think will work at larger scales. I'm working on designing our production facility for our first scale of production, which we'll be producing meat for a couple restaurants. So that involves finding the right equipment, making sure that the building is built to all the right specifications that can be approved by the FDA for regulation. I work with our research scientists to kind of combine all of the things that they're working on, on the very early stage R&D, such as, getting new types of cells from new species of animals, developing new materials for us to grow our cells on developing new media that we feed to the cells. Combining all of that and turning that into a process where we can produce lots and lots of cells. And then on the other side of it, we have food scientists and product developers that we will give our outputs from our bioreactors to. And so they're telling me, we want these different characteristics of the meat that you're making from the bioreactors. And so then we can fine tune our process. Meet their requirements as well.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. All of these roles from the, you know, process engineering to other roles is primarily people from the Bioengineering background coming into this field, or are there other skill sets that are useful?

Will Paton:

Yeah, there are lots of different skillsets and I think whether you're at a company like mine that is actually trying to make a meat product, or if you're at a company that is making some sort of inputs to provide to companies that are making meat products there's a lot of overlap between the types of people that work at these companies. So all of these companies will have lots of Research Scientists doing just very fundamental research to figure out the best way to do things. Developing new technologies, kind of working on the cutting edge fields such as Cell Biology, Chemistry Material Science, Food Science. And then there are Engineers like me that work on optimizing the process, scaling up production, bringing down the cost of production and then also developing new hardware and software for the industry. And then once these products can be made by the Scientists and Engineers, there are people on the business side that have to figure out who do we sell this to? How do we sell this? So in our case we have product managers that are working on how do we sell these products to a restaurant, and then also how do we help with marketing these products to the general public because it's a new thing that many people are not familiar with and it might be strange to some people. So we wanna make sure that we educate people in the right way. So that they'll adopt this new technology.

Pratibha Pandit:

You touched upon it as well that cell culture has existed for a very long time. I mean, years ago I remember reading this amazing book you know, the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks I think

Will Paton:

Hmm

Pratibha Pandit:

It talks extensively about the early days of cell culture and all of that. What other applications exist? What other industries use cell culture?

Will Paton:

Yeah. So cell culture is essential for many types of therapeutic research. So for example, in the biopharmaceutical industry they use really similar technologies to what we are doing to produce pharmaceutical drugs.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm.

Will Paton:

If they're trying to produce like a Monoclonal antibody drug a company will grow cells and engineer them to produce this Monoclonal antibody. So that's one field for pharmaceutical testing. One of the first stages of that process is to see how cells in culture respond to new drugs. And then some of the more cutting edge fields. Yeah. Mm-hmm. that's testing. And then some of the newer fields that use cell culture are things like there's a company called Organovo that is developing organs that they can grow. Outside of a human and either use them for testing new drugs on them to see how these organs respond or they can also, they're trying to make new organs that can be used for transplantation. So that's a really exciting field and it has a lot of parallels with what we're doing. And so lots of the technology overlaps between the two.

Pratibha Pandit:

Cool. Now you did your undergrad in Bioengineering. Help me connect the dots, if somebody wants to get into cellular agriculture, what would be important as an education background?

Will Paton:

Yeah. I think, Bioengineering was a great major for me because the way it was taught at my university at Santa Clara University.

Pratibha Pandit:

my alma matter as well

Will Paton:

that's right. Go Broncos.

Pratibha Pandit:

Yes. Go Broncos.

Will Paton:

It's, it's a pretty broad field Bioengineering. So, we had three different tracks in bioengineering. My focus was in biomolecular engineering, but there was also a track for biomedical device engineering, which had much heavier focus on electrical engineering mechanical engineering. Software engineering. Whereas my track was more focused on cell biology, organic chemistry, things like that. So I think both, both approaches could be really useful in this field. And I think I was really fascinated by the science side of it, the kind of hardcore biology, because I had a really good biology teacher in high school, and so that was a really useful for me to get into this field because I took a few classes where I got to do cell culture and I got to do some tissue engineering where we were understanding how cells grow into tissues and it directly related to what we're trying to do in this with growing actual animal tissues outside of the body.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. And did you learn about the whole, this world of, you know, lab-based food production during your undergrad? How did you come across this field and tell me about your journey into, from education to getting into the workforce in this field.

Will Paton:

Yeah, so I found out about this field I think through a newsletter that I was a part of at the school. And I got connected with this nonprofit organization called New Harvest, which supports academic research for cellular agriculture. And through there I signed up for their newsletter and saw that a company called Upside Foods was hiring interns when I was in my last year of college. And so I started doing some research on the field because I was looking for a job and got really excited about it because I really wanted to do something with a big impact on the world. And doing something with an environmental impact was something that really excited me. So I found out about this internship applied for, it didn't get it but, through the process I made some good connections with some folks at Upside Foods and I just was really excited about the field as a whole and really wanted to see how I could get involved. So, luckily, because I was in the Bay Area at Santa Clara, which is kind of the hub for many of the startups in this space, I was able to go to a lot of different networking events in person. And I reached out to lots of people on LinkedIn. I started using Twitter pretty actively to kind of engage with folks in the industry who are active on Twitter and was able to meet a couple people at another company called Mission Barns. That had just started at the time.

Pratibha Pandit:

They were looking for someone straight out of undergrad at time and so I was able to get a job with them, which was really fortunate. But I think that I was lucky to be in the Bay Area to be able to meet people in person, but also this industry seems to be very open. People want to get more people engaged and excited in it and so was really easy to network with other folks because they were super open to meeting with me even though I was just an undergrad in college and talk about my interests and talk about how I could get involved. Typically, anything that is more of a pure sciences and heavily research based type of industries. the education qualifications required tend to be higher. Like, you know, you need to have a grad program and PhD maybe. How is it here in this industry? Like is it typical for people to have a PhD or, you know or it's kind of spread out?

Will Paton:

So, I don't have a PhD but most of the scientists that I work with at my company do have PhDs, and I think it really depends on the kind of company culture and the, the people at the company that you're going to, whether they will require you to have an advanced degree or not. But it seems that at larger companies especially there is a higher requirement for having an advanced degree, whereas sometimes in startups there may be less of that requirement. At least from the two startups I've worked at. That's what I've noticed. So I think you can definitely do it without PhD or a Master's degree, but sometimes it might take a little bit longer. You have to work a little bit longer than you would versus if you had a PhD or a Master's.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Great. Now when you were in high school, was your focus getting into bioengineering? Like how did you you know, what, what were the, some of the activities or anything that you may be involved in during high school to get into undergrad program in bioengineering?

Will Paton:

Yeah, so in in high school when I was applying to college, I thought I wanted to go to medical school. Straight after undergrad. I was excited about healthcare because I had some folks in my family who were in the healthcare field and I was excited about science because I had a really great biology teacher and a really great chemistry teacher in high school and I just found both of those classes super interesting, and I chose bioengineering over one of the other typical majors for pre-med students because I really wanted to get kind of the other sides of the bioengineering degree, which were kind of some mechanical engineering, some computer engineering. I'm pretty good at math, so I was excited. take kind of the more higher level math classes. And I think I just have always kind of had a bit of an engineering mindset. And so doing bioengineering seemed like a good combination of all of those interests for me.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Now, for somebody to enjoy the courseworks and the work that follows after your college, what are some of the interests they should have? Like, you know, I hear this commonly as I speak to people now in my other interests that a lot of kids don't wanna become they don't wanna go to medical school, but they wanna do something in the area. So what are, what are some of the things that they may not know? Like is it biology, chemistry? Like what is that that they need to be really interested in to really enjoy this field?

Will Paton:

Yeah, I think that at least for me, the coursework in college was pretty challenging for the most part. There were lots of rigorous courses and calculus and chemistry and biology, and I think that without having, Uh, really strong interest and excitement for the science, it could be easy to get discouraged by all of those challenging classes, especially early on. I think that many of them are designed to kind of weed people out. You have like a big chemistry lecture and they kind of make it super hard so that the people who maybe thought they wanted to go to med school when they start college might change their mind after that because it's so challenging. So I think you one have to be really excited about actually going into this. And then it also just kind of requires a lot of hard work and determination through school to be able to be successful and get good grades and go through. But then as you go into a job in any science field, there's gonna be a lot of things that are challenging to learn or you know, you're running experiments and things don't go right. It's, there's lots of times when things just don't work the way you expect them to. And so you kind of have to just have that sense of determination to keep pushing through if things are failing a lot, so that you don't get too discouraged.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. in a lot of the fields, it's true for some of the software industries as well where education provides the foundation, but much of the day-to-day job that you do you learn on job, right? That's true for many industries. How about this, because it's very research based industry, like you're doing experiments at your work. Do you feel ready for work, from the education or do you suggest, you know, you need to also do other things like internships or anything else?

Will Paton:

Yeah, I think I may have benefited from either doing an internship while I was an undergrad in this field or at another biotech company. I didn't do any internships like that during college or by doing research in a laboratory at my university. I did some research my first year of college in a plant biology lab that was the work we were doing was not similar to what I'm doing now in any way. So I think you can learn a lot from that, just from, from being in the lab, learning what, you know, doing experiments is like, because there are not always opportunities at every university to do that type of stuff through your coursework. I was fortunate to have several opportunities to do independent research through my coursework, but many universities don't provide those types of opportunities. But I think the foundational knowledge I had from my undergrad program has been very useful for me in my job right now. But I've learned so much since I graduated from undergrad. And I think that there are some of the things that I learned that were more general skills that have helped me learn more in my job. Things like, you know, being able to look at data and understand what's going on, being able to actually design and run experiments and then analyze and present the data and be able to make decisions based on that. And then also, learning how to read scientific papers and understand what's going on because there's so much research that's out there that you can always learn a lot from what other people have done and kind of build upon that rather than having to do everything yourself. So I have a folder full of hundreds of papers on my computer of all the things that I've read, even just since, since starting my current job a little over a year ago.

Pratibha Pandit:

So patience is definitely a virtue in this field. Yeah.

Will Paton:

Yeah, definitely patience and I think just like a curiosity to always keep learning more. There's with, with science, I think probably with most jobs, you're never gonna know everything and so you just have to have that hunger to always keep learning more.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. You mentioned data and data analysis that you know piqued my interest. So do you also learn anything about data analysis and those type of skills? Is that field taught as part of bioengineering?

Will Paton:

Yeah, I think we did learn some basic data analysis but, I wish that I had taken more hardcore statistics course in college because I have spent so much time trying to teach myself statistics since graduating from college just to be able to make. Kind of better decisions based on the data that I'm looking at and design experiments in better ways. So I think that having that strong foundation in statistics is important in any quantitative field.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Any industry, especially when it is an emerging industry like this the question probably most parents would ask if somebody wants to get into this, is, how are the opportunities, like, how is the industry emerging? You know, are there mostly startups? What is the job opportunities look like?

Will Paton:

Yeah, so for cellular agriculture, it's pretty much all startups in this field right now. The oldest company in our field was started in 2016 and they maybe have 300 people now. So they're larger than my company, which is only 30 people, but still relatively small compared to lots of the much larger biotechnology or just pure technology companies. So I think that there's pros and cons to being in startups like this. There's a lot of opportunity for growth and gaining a lot of responsibility early in your career, which is I think something that I've benefited a lot from in the two startups I've worked in. However, it's a much less structured and so there's, there can be lots of uncertainty. There may not be formal training programs like there might be in larger companies. Sometimes, you know, things can be changing a lot in terms of restructuring the organization or other things like that. So yeah, I think there's definitely more uncertainty there.

Pratibha Pandit:

Mm-hmm. Yeah sounds like pretty much like software startups so, yeah. But the skills that you are, like, you know, what you are learning and the skills you are gaining are transferrable to many other biotech companies, correct?

Will Paton:

Absolutely. Yeah. Mm.

Pratibha Pandit:

That's really great. Finally Will, what would you suggest, what, what are some of the resources would you recommend to anyone who is interested in researching about this field? You know, maybe as early as in high school or you know, early years of college. What, what are some of the resources would you recommend? Maybe forums or, you know, websites?

Will Paton:

So, there's a, an organization called the Good Food Institute does a lot of research and advocacy work for all different types of alternative proteins. So plant-based proteins cultured meat things that involve fermentation like the collagen company I was mentioning earlier. And they have some slack groups that you can join. They have some databases of different companies. Was able to speak with folks at the Good Food Institute when I was in undergrad and make some connections there. So I think that's a great place to start. They also just have really good resources on their website to be able to do some high level research on the industry and dive deep if that's what you're interested in. There's another organization called New Harvest which, doesn't focus as much on for-profit companies. They focus more on academic research, but they provide research grants to undergraduate students and graduate students to do research in this field, and I think they're another good resource to connect with. Both of these organizations also have annual conferences that are both in-person and virtual. So those are good places to learn more about the industry and connect with people. And then lastly, the Cultured Meat Symposium is an annual event that's held in San Francisco every year, but also is online. I know the organizer, Alex, he's really nice and generous about either giving discounted or free tickets to young people. When I was in college, I volunteered at the event and was able to meet some leaders of some of the companies who were speaking at the event and that's a really good place also to kind of learn more about the industry and connect with people.

Pratibha Pandit:

Amazing. Thank you so much, Will, I learned about industries that I didn't even know existed. Thank you so much for joining me today and giving details about the whole industry. Really appreciate your time and I wish you all the best in your career.

Will Paton:

Thanks for having me on Pratibha. nice talking with you.

To learn more about this field visit Good Food Institute, gfi.org and, new-harvest.org This is career calling. And I'm your host. Thank you for joining me today.