Start-Up Gourmey Pioneers Poultry Digital Twins to Revolutionise Cultivated Meat
In a bold fusion of biotechnology and artificial intelligence, French cultivated meat start-up Gourmey has teamed up with biotech innovator DeepLife to create the world’s first poultry digital twins.
These are virtual replicas of avian cells designed to transform research and development in the future of food.
A New Era of Food Technology
Digital twins – long used in aerospace, engineering, and increasingly by food giants like Nestlé and Unilever – are digital replicas of physical systems or processes that use real-world data to simulate behaviour.
They allow scientists to test and optimise variables without incurring the cost, time, and waste associated with physical trials. Now, this powerful tool is being deployed in the cultivated meat sector, with Gourmey leading the charge.
Gourmey, known for its mission to deliver ethical and sustainable foie gras alternatives, is pushing the boundaries of food innovation by creating digital twins of poultry cells.
In partnership with DeepLife, a biotech company more commonly found in the pharmaceutical world, the start-up is using these virtual cell models to predict and optimise the behaviour of avian cells during the cultivation process.
How Digital Twins Work in Cultivated Meat
The process begins with the collection of sequencing data from millions of avian cells, capturing gene activity across different environmental and biochemical conditions.
This extensive dataset is then processed by DeepLife’s Large Language Models (LLMs), designed not to generate text but to extract and map intracellular interactions within the cells.
What sets DeepLife apart is its use of causal AI – a distinct branch of deep learning that focuses on uncovering cause-and-effect relationships rather than mere correlations. This approach allows Gourmey to simulate the influence of various media formulations and growth conditions, offering insights into how specific molecules impact cell populations in real time.
Every tweak, from nutrient levels to metabolic efficiency, can be digitally explored before a single physical experiment takes place.
Efficiency, Quality, and Sustainability
The advantages are immense. With a working digital twin, Gourmey can digitally fine-tune cell cultivation parameters – such as feed composition and metabolic output – before committing to costly wet lab experiments.
This not only shortens the R&D timeline but also dramatically reduces the cost of production, a crucial factor in making cultivated meat commercially viable.
Furthermore, since the feed used in cultivated meat greatly influences the taste, texture, and nutritional profile of the final product – much like traditional animal feed affects the flavour of meat – Gourmey can now virtually trial feed formulations to develop products that not only mimic but exceed the quality expectations of traditional poultry.
The CEO of Gourmey expressed that this partnership allows them to simulate and optimise every stage of production. By combining their proprietary cultivation platform and analytical tools with DeepLife’s digital twin technology, they are accelerating innovation while minimising waste and cost.
A Shared Mission for Healthier Futures
DeepLife’s foray into cultivated meat marks a significant pivot from its usual domain – drug discovery – where it uses digital twins of human cells to investigate treatments for complex diseases.
But for the biotech firm, the partnership is a natural extension of its core purpose: using advanced cell engineering to solve humanity’s most pressing health challenges.
DeepLife’s CEO explained that whether it’s curing disease or producing sustainable food, the underlying principle is the same. They are engineering cells to behave in desirable ways. The applications may differ, but the goal remains aligned – improving lives through technology.
Conclusion: The Virtual Future of Food
As the cultivated meat sector races to bring sustainable, ethical alternatives to the nation’s plates, the integration of AI and digital twin technology could prove a game-changer.
Gourmey’s pioneering approach – blending advanced cell engineering with causal AI – shows that the future of food might not only be grown in labs but also modelled in code.
By simulating biological complexity digitally, start-ups like Gourmey are turning what was once science fiction into a scalable solution for a more sustainable world.
News Credits: AI and digital twins power cultivated meat R&D
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