Patents and Innovations in Cultivated Meat Production

This chapter presents the technological mapping of cultivated meat production. A patent search was carried out in the Derwent Innovations Index Database using a combination of synonyms of “cultivated meat” in the field Topic. From this search, 219 documents were selected and classified according to the publication year, the countries of publication, whether the document was submitted to an international application, the assignees, and the International Patent Classification (IPC) codes. The curve of patent publications per year started its exponential phase in 2019, and the trend line is still rising sharply, meaning that cultivated meat technologies are in the growth stage. China, South Korea and the United States contributed to most publications. The top assignees were Jiangnan University, Shanghai CellX Biotechnology, Nanjing Agricultural University, China Meat Research Center and Nanjing Joes Future Food Technology from China, Yonsei University Industry Foundation from South Korea, Aleph Farms from Israel, and Northwest University, Tufts College and Terasaki Biomedical Innovation Institute from the United States. The most frequent IPC codes were C12N-005/077 (58%) and A23L-013/00 (47%). The documents were grouped and analyzed within different technology areas to describe the recent advances and innovations focusing on culture media, bioreactors and cultivation methods, microcarriers and scaffolds, and product formulations.