Cellular engineered fish is coming to a plate near you soon

If you ordered a fish at a restaurant, would you always expect it to be fresh, caught from the sea? What if it had been grown directly from cells?

This is the vision of Israeli startup Wanda Fish. Its mission is to help marine biology and contribute to the reduction of water pollution and overfishing by changing the way that fish makes it to our plates. They are making sustainable fish fillets from cells. In order to do this, the startup has collaborated with David Kaplan, a researcher at the prestigious Boston research university, Tufts.

Kaplan will help Wanda Fish refine their technology, so that fish production will no longer need to include fishing, transportation and processing. Instead, it will include cell collection and expansion and tissue maturation.

“Marine biodiversity is critical to the survival of people and our planet. But overfishing, as well as water pollution, is damaging the vast and vital ocean ecosystem. Many wild fish populations are sadly in decline,” said Daphna Heffetz, CEO of Wanda Fish. Heffetz has been establishing and working in biotechnology companies for over 20 years.

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Kaplan is the Stern Family Professor of Engineering, chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts and is a cellular agriculture specialist. Together with his team, he has spent years working on reproducing the characteristics of ‘real meat’ using alternative substances and cellular engineering.

Recently, he was awarded funding from the US Department of Agriculture to create the first-ever US centre dedicated to research in this area. Now, fish has become one of his latest projects and according to Heffetz, progress has already been made in creating the first product prototype.

Overfishing creates unbalance in marine biodiversity, causing shifts in centuries-old ecosystems, and putting particular strain on coral reefs. It means that oceans are less abundant and fewer fish reproduce. Around 200 million people are employed either directly or indirectly by marine fisheries and 3 billion people rely on marine and coastal biodiversity for their livelihood.

Alt-proteins have been around for years, but it is an ever-growing sector – in 2020 alone the industry raised $3.1 billion (€1.2 billion) in investments, three times the sum of any previous year. Alt-proteins are usually meat, egg or dairy replacement products that have been cultivated in some way, derived from fermentation, plant-based, or a combination of the above.

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While some squirm at the idea of foods that have been made using science and cells, the engineering process allows for producers to remove harmful substances in fish – for example, microplastics, mercury, or other chemical toxicities – that can often be found in wild catches.

Wanda Fish also says its products have an improved shelf life and nutrient levels remain high, despite being an ‘alt-protein’. The company boasts no byproducts made during production and high efficiency. The idea is to produce fillets that will mimic the textures and flavours of a variety of fish.

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