• Israel-based BioBetter, a manufacturing platform for producing animal-free growth factors using tobacco plants, raised USD 10 million in a Series A funding round led by Jerusalem Venture Partners with additional investment from Milk and Honey Investments, LLC, and the Israeli Innovation Authority.

• The funding is expected to help scale up the production of cell-cultured meat and will be used to expand the company’s growth factor portfolio, move to a larger pilot plant in Tel Hai Industrial Park in the Upper Galilee Region of Israel, and increase the workforce. 

• BioBetter has used Tobacco plants as natural, self-sustaining, animal-free bioreactors in the development of a novel protein manufacturing platform for the production of growth factors. The company claims that its technology has the potential to bring down costs of growth factors to USD 1 per gram from the current range of USD 50,000–500,000 per gram.

<ul><li> Analyst QuickTake: While cell-cultured meat is currently only sold in Singapore, Israel is at the forefront of the alternative meat industry and is competing closely with the US with many startups, investments, and developments initiated within the country. One of the challenges for the commercialization (apart from regulatory approvals) of cell-cultured meat is the high production cost it carries due to its heavy reliance on expensive growth media which makes cell-cultured products much more expensive than conventional meat. Discovering a growth medium substitute for fetal bovine serum (FBS) is a key challenge for commercialization due to the high price tag it carries and the limited availability. Developments such as BioBetter’s animal-free growth media carry the potential to create a global impact in the cell-cultured meat industry by significantly bringing production costs down.</ul>