Cultured meat - a patentometric analysis

Abstract

Cultured meat (CM) has emerged as a breakthrough technology, which has the potential to minimise future negative impacts associated with the rapidly growing world population; such as serious environmental, sustainability, global public health, and animal welfare concerns. Recently numerous researchers in academia and companies have been putting significant efforts into scientific and translational development in this field. Since various pillars of CM manufacturing hold substantial translational potential, there has been a steady interest in filing patent applications globally in the past decade. For the first time, we have performed a patentometric analysis for cultured meat by highlighting the current patents landscape, determining prolific organisations and geographical locations active in the area, and identifying the overall outlook for the field. In total, > 190 patents published in the English language were collected from 1997 to 2020 for the analysis. Relevant data were extracted from the patents, including technology focus, country of origin, assignees, priority date, cooperative patent classification (CPC) code, to analyse the current patent landscape.

Keywords:

• Cultured meat
• cultivated meat
• lab-grown meat
• alternative proteins
• smart proteins
• plant-based meat
• patents
• patent applications
• intellectual property

Acknowledgment

This research/project is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore, and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), under the Singapore Food Story R&D Programme (Grant No:H20H8a0003). We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to Mr Ong Ding Shan and Mr Harvin Siaputra for cross-cheking our patents database.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.