Name: The fishing industry is in crisis — could lab-grown seafood be the answer?
Uploaded: 2025-08-30T17:52:19.000Z
Duration: 5 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Many of the industries we have today have been run extractively for the last few centuries, and we're reaching a tipping point in terms of not having sustainable supply to keep producing the products that we eat every day.

Transition words & phrases

Seafood in particular is a critical area because we have overfished nearly 90% of the oceans, and so with population growth expected before mid-century, we're going to have a food shortage of seafood unless we can produce additional food from a different source.

I'm the founder and CEO of Umami Bioworks.

We work on developing a platform for manufacturing of cell-based products.

Here we have several of the applications that we have developed and are developing and showcasing right now.

Currently, we're working on a range of species, including eel or unagi, bluefin tuna, red snapper, lobster, and prawn.

We look for species that are endangered, threatened, or protected, and have high demand and name recognition from consumers, but that can't be easily grown on farms economically.

So let me take you over to the lab where our team is working.

On this side of the lab is where we do all of our cell culture and our cell analytics, and then here you can see the bioreactors.

The simple process broken down is we get a fish from a veterinary-approved source, and we take a biopsy, and from that tissue sample, we isolate the cell type we're looking for, and we put it through a single-cell cloning device.

So that allows us to separate the cells, which means each of them has their own unique genetic identity, and we go through what we call cell breeding, which means selecting the cells that have the right traits.

Then we grow those cells to the point that we can start doing screening for media development with two focuses.

One is remove all animal components from the media, and the second is to reduce the cost of the media, and then the last real major step is converting the media formulation and the cell line that have been established into a process that grows in the bioreactors and that scales.

Once all of that is done, we can send it out for food safety testing.

This is my colleague, Ninh Ping, who will tell you a little bit more about our early-stage process.

The culture media is a very enriched broth that contains a lot of macronutrients, micronutrients that the cells may need.

Right now, I'm seeding the cells, and after which I'll be topping up some of the extracts that we have prepared.

So we're doing everything now inside a biosafety cabinet, because we don't want bacteria to get in.

So now I'm going to add some of the extracts into some wells, because we just want to test how well this is doing in combination with other extracts.

Okay, so now the plates will be left to incubate for a fixed duration, and after which we'll remove the plates, stain them, and then use the imager to analyse the cell count.

Then we'll use our software to optimise the brightness, the contrast and exposure, so that we are able to see the cells in a clearer way.

At the end of the entire process, we'll just have to consolidate the data, and then we'll analyse it so that it can help us optimise our media formulation.

And then from here, we will pass on the best media formulation that we have to Arijit, who is in our bioprocess team, so they can use this to help him scale up in a bioreactor.

I'm Dr Arijit Das, a research scientist and also group lead in bioprocess upstream development.

Initially, when we get the media, we add up the cells in the spinner flask, and then we have to multiply the cells for three to four days.

And after multiplying, we'll expand the cells to the next higher spinner flask.

And after four days, when the cell has been multiplied, we'll be shifting it towards the bioreactor.

We'll be harvesting the cells for the differentiation.

We'll be getting the various fat and the muscle cells, and those fat cells will be going to the food development team, where they will be playing with various prototypes and making the real food.

Our goal is actually selling production capacity, as opposed to making finished products, to basically be a technology partner.

Our core platform brings together stem cell biology, machine learning, and industrial automation.

We anticipate having products launching in 2025, with regulatory approvals in, we hope, at least two countries.

But right now, we're starting with high-end premium products like where consumers might pay $200 or $225 a kilogram, but over time, we see a clear path to being able to deliver 50% to 70% cost reduction from current prices.

It's about creating a narrative that is compelling and understanding why consumers might want it.

For some, that might just be no mercury, no microplastics.

But for others, it might be a fish that doesn't taste so fishy, but it's high omega-3.

So we have the opportunity to really find an identity that actually meets an unmet desire that consumers have today.