Conference: Cultured Meat Safety Initiative Phase 3 Workshop Series - Developing an action plan for collaborative research on cultured meat and seafood safety.

Cultured meat and seafood (CM) products provide an opportunity to help meet growing global demand for nutritious, sustainable, and safe protein sources. As with every new technology, safety demonstration is critical to bringing CM products to market and gaining public acceptance. While two CM products are authorized in the US, these do not encompass the full range of potential processes and products and only mark the start of such assessments.

Currently, regulators use a case-by-case approach to safety evaluations due to a lack of standardized, publicly available data, which can be burdensome. Additionally, the paucity of safety methods and data requires CM start-ups to conduct duplicative, resource-intensive research. Through the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative, Vireo Advisors and New Harvest have clearly outlined research priorities for CM safety demonstration as identified by industry, governmental, and academic stakeholders.

This workshop series aims to initiate a coordinated research effort to address CM safety priorities and develop shared data to support transparent food risk assessments and decision-making processes, advance CM safety demonstration, and promote access to safer and more sustainable foods.

The workshops convene stakeholders across diverse disciplines and sectors to create a research action plan and initiate research. Workshops are designed to build relationships amongst industry, academic, and governmental scientists and gain buy-in for collaborative work. Specifically, expert presentations and group discussions focus on the current state of CM safety evaluation and key knowledge gaps.

Discussions are tailored to participants of each workshop, and aim to refine research topics into a research roadmap, including actionable hypotheses and potential leaders/collaborators. Anticipated outputs of the workshops include a research roadmap that will be shared openly to guide the formation of research programs, working groups, and other infrastructure for continued collaboration and coordination.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.