This is basically correct. The "making them cancerous" part isn't quite how I'd describe it but it's not a totally unfair description

I assume bovine sarcoma (specifically muscle) cancer cells are the ones you'd want to investigate first. All the hard work of overcoming apoptosis is done for you already. That'd be a ***** to do from scratch. I'd guess you're trying to find a bovine version of HeLa, a reliable immortal line taken from a human cancer patient. Stem or fetal cells might be interesting too.

Although I guess your first customers are ground/processed meat which is a large industry, so any connective tissues might work. McDonalds Cancer Burger or perhaps the McFetus burger could be a marketing hit imo.

Where do I invest?

Sam Harris did an episode about this. Sounds really interesting but it looks like it's going to take time to become economical. From my understanding you will be able to choose your fat profile, protein, flavor, etc. Like the baskin robbins of meat and none of the slaughter

https://www.memphismeats.com/

This was my first question about the lab meat. Do they have a decent sample size of people eating this? I don't want to eat something that will turn me into a zombie. I am hesitant to try it until further notice. But I support the idea.

Induced pluripotent stem cells are going to be our strategy and that of most of the major players in this space as far as I know.

First products will indeed be ground/minced. Burgers, nuggets, sausages. One company (Aleph Farms) has already produced a "3D" steak albeit an extremely thin one. Structured meat is an order of magnitude larger challenge than creating the processed stuff which can essentially be a bunch of single-layers of cells consolidated together without having to really worry about a scaffod to grow them on etc.

If you are serious about investing I'd be happy to send you my deck

Choosing fat profile is going to be one of the major advantages. The primary challenge is growing the muscle tissue which is 100% protein and it will then be up to whoever is producing it to decide how much, if any, fat to include as well as what time. Think beef burger with 100% unsaturated fats etc. It remains to be seen how close the taste/texture will be in a scenario like that but that is essentially our goal.

Choosing the protein combinations is an interesting opportunity as well. It will be possible to create never before seen combinations such as a turducken where the chicken/turkey/duck muscle fibers are all completely intertwined instead of just layered next to eachother as clearly discreet chunks.

And yes it's likely a ways off from being economical. Scaling from prototype production to commercial production is a hurdle no one seems close to clearing yet.

There are probably <100 people that have eaten it to date. I am not a scientist but from the scientists I've talked to no one seems overly concerned about turning anyone into zombies At the end of the day it's cells that are no different than the cells inside of a cow/pig/chicken etc just "eating" a slightly different "diet" and being grown in-vitro.

I am possibly interested in investing. This is an area that I think has huge potential and I have no ability to get exposure to.

Any guesses on the timeline to retail? To price competitiveness with butchered meat? Is this a decade+ away or a few years?

Seems like a horrible investment. NLSoldier seems honest about the limitations/timeline which is a big plus though.

A company called JUST who produces vegan "eggs" and mayo etc announced they were going to have a cultured meat product on the market (in some international location) by the end of 2018 which didn't happen but I'd expect they will get something released somewhere within 2019. They claim the holdup has been purely regulatory but I'm quite confident whatever they are planning on releasing would be at very small scale and a major money loser in terms of production cost vs price to consumer.

Realistically I think medium scale production (thinking high-end restaurants or boutique grocers) is probably 2-4 years away. Price competitive with traditional meat and/or actual profitability for these companies could easily be a decade away. But in theory the price should eventually come down even lower than traditional meat given that vastly lower resource intensiveness of production. Growing a cow is a terribly inefficient way to make a burger.

There is a major scaling issue industry wide - the tech has been proven in very small bioreactors but there's a big engineering challenge in scaling to production size bioreactors while still keeping the cells "happy" and proliferating in the same way.

The other probably biggest challenge right now is in finding a cost effective serum-free media to "feed" the cells. Most previous prototypes that have been produced have been made using fetal bovine serum which is prohibitively expensive and widely accepted to not be the sustainable way forward (largely due to the fact that it obviously involves major harm to animals).

Didn't mean to totally hijack this thread. I'll start my own tomorrow since it sounds like there's a good amount of interest and I'd love to get some feedback from you guys.

I wonder if cancer cells are worth considering. If everyone else is doing one thing and you do another and succeed, you're hard to beat. The difficulty of stem cells I would guess is the soup required to nourish and stimulate them?

There are an estimated 50 million tons of this beautiful lady around the world:



Get that happening with aggressive bovine connective tissues cancers and you've probably got a winner for ground meat. I imagine there's much lower cost and more mature tech growing immortal prolific cell lines than there is stem cells with their careful coaxing and signalling/nutrients.

Yup. Hence if you get a cow version of HeLa you've laughing.

I'm just learning about the HeLa thing so I'm not sure if there's something special going on there in terms of ease of proliferation/growth media needs in that case, but as far as being immortalized, induced pluripotent stem cell lines are immortalized as well. One biopsy from a living cow can produce a near endless amounts of beef.

I'm not in that business, but I worked with (cancer) cell lines, HeLa cells are nothing special, they are terrible actually in some respects because they mutated all over, and some of these lines barely resemble the genome of the actual person anymore, but peeps are still using them for reference purposes and out of availability/ laziness etc.
Back on topic AFAIK no butcher gives a **** selecting out any cancer when they spot them, they may put them to another line that goes into heavily processed meat such as meatballs, sausages etc. so you eat that all the time when you eat regular meat. So I guess it's relatively safe, as much as industry food is

Thinking that AI/lab meat/Nano-this/Quantum-that is a good bet is not very useful if there is no vehicle to bet. These companies are mostly private. Most are also riding the hype with imaginary timelines and crap teams.

As for lab meat, a good bet might by Tysons. They'll probably buy out and scale anything with promise in the same way that tech giants buy out all the startups with promising products. Thoughts?

It's funny you mentioned the words "holy grail." I wasn't going to bring it up again but a few months ago I mentioned a private battery company I'm invested in which is focused on exactly that. Last week they were featured on Forbes in an article by Rob Rapier called "The Holy Grail of Lithium Batteries." Let me know if you want more info.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier.../#511d15da3d63



I haven't had time to share my opinion about predicting the next super fad yet, but I agree that battery/energy storage breakthroughs and biotech will be huge. The only problem is recently many companies are staying private longer so most of the appreciation isn't accessible to the public.

That's just picking a cyclical sector that never recovered from 2008 and saying that they are due for a comeback. What are you seeing that makes you think this is going to recover, and once recovered stay recovered?

Seems to me that containers are the present/future and dry bulk is overbuilt with ships that have multi decade lifespans. I guess I'm not seeing how they are going to bounce back.

Great idea for a thread! While these may not be short term, here are two that I have made bets on:

Interactive Video

Non-embryonic stem cells (i.e., in treatment of certain medical conditions)

Although the answer is still crypto, my non-crypto answer will be vr/ar

in my mind part of the fad element is the shortness of it's existence (assuming the fad doesnt become a full on trend.) If so I think something around gaming may come out, or perhaps some new form of digital entertainment (interactive etc.)

also with sports betting becoming legalized across the US soon I expect there will be a fad element to part of the market opening up for new bettors (think about the bonanza that was daily fantasy when it first came out and everyone trying to go get the people who werent already doing fantasy.)

I am still very bullish on limit Omaha.

I think this is very accurate. I think every current or former professional gambler here agrees with you as well. Collectively I'd say we actually have a very educated opinion as well.

If we're looking for something that's close to true coming out of this thread I think this is as good as we're going to collectively do.

$1B+ Market Map: The World’s 326 Unicorn Companies In One Infographic

investing in humans

I was joking. People that watched or traded tickers like DRYS which went like +1000% the other year in the shippers squeeze might have found it amusing.

I for one enjoyed the joke