Grants
Innovation Challenge 2019
Profile
Atal Incubation Centre-CCMB in collaboration with Humane Society International has released an Innovation Challenge regarding clean meat, which is meat grown by growing cells in the lab. The challenge involves writing a review on recommendations/solutions for optimizing the use of technologies and tools to offer solutions to loopholes that currently prevent commercialization of clean meat. The selected paper would receive a prize of 5,00,000 upon being published.
Clean meat (also called cultured meat or cell-based meat) is animal meat grown by farming cells obtained from the animal directly rather than by raising and slaughtering animals. Clean meat is produced by taking a small sample of animal cells, and replicating them outside of the animal. The resulting product is biologically and nutritionally equivalent to conventionally produced meat, but without the antibiotics, E. coli, salmonella, or animal waste. At its essence, meat is simply a collection of cells — predominantly muscle cells, with fat cells and a handful of other cell types, collectively called the connective tissue, contributing to its structure. All of these cells can be grown in controlled, sterile environments outside of the body of an animal, resulting in a product that replicates the sensory and nutritional profile of meat.
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Qualification
- Representatives of public and private institutions with minimum educational qualification of Ph.D
- PhD & post-doctoral level students may serve as lead investigator of the project proposal with a brief letter of support signed by the faculty member expressing his/her commitment to serve as advisor & project collaborator.
To Apply
All findings, protocols and materials generated through this grant will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) or an equivalent license. For ease of access, all materials and protocols will be deposited into existing databases or collections. A portion of the grant money should be utilized towards Article Processing Charges for Open Access publication, as applicable.
Important Dates and Payment Structure:
Launch of Innovation Challenge: September 15th, 2019
Last date of application: November 15th, 2019
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