 | |
| Industry | Biotechnology |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2011 |
| Founders | Andras Forgacs Gabor Forgacs Karoly Jakab Francoise Marga |
| Headquarters | , U.S. |
Key people | Catherine Roggero-Lovis (CEO) [1] |
| Website | modernmeadow |
Modern Meadow is an American biotechnology company that uses biofabrication to create sustainable materials. The company was co-founded by Andras Forgacs, Gabor Forgacs, Karoly Jakab and Francoise Marga in 2011, and is based in Nutley, New Jersey. [2] [3]
In 2011, Andras Forgacs and his father Gabor Forgacs, Jakab and Marga co-founded Modern Meadow. [2] The company’s initial goal was to create leather and meat in tissue cultures, without the use of live animals. [4]
In 2018, Modern Meadow partnered with Evonik to commercially produce biofabricated materials. [5] [3]
Modern Meadow entered into a joint venture in 2021 with Limonta, an Italian textiles and materials company, to create BioFabric. The new company creates sustainable materials through a process called biofabrication. [6]
In 2017, it was announced that Modern Meadow had plans to develop the “world’s first biofabricated leather”. The company displayed a prototype T-shirt made from the material at the Museum of Modern Art in an exhibit, “Items: Is Fashion Modern,” until 2018. [4] In 2022, Catherine Roggero-Lovisi became the company’s CEO. [1]
The company makes plant-based protein biopolymers to create a variety of textiles. It combines plant-based proteins with bio-based polyurethane. The resulting polymer blend is called Bio-Alloy. [7] [8] [3]
Bio-Alloy is used to create plant-based leather alternatives including Bio-Tex, which the company developed for the American fashion brand Tory Burch; [9] as well as Bio-VERA, a blend of biomaterial and synthetic polymer substrate [10] made for use in transportation, wall coverings, and interior design. [11]
Leather is a strong, flexible and durable material obtained from the tanning, or chemical treatment, of animal skins and hides to prevent decay. The most common leathers come from cattle, sheep, goats, equine animals, buffalo, pigs and hogs, and aquatic animals such as seals and alligators.
Mycelium is a root-like structure of a fungus consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. Its normal form is that of branched, slender, entangled, anastomosing, hyaline threads. Fungal colonies composed of mycelium are found in and on soil and many other substrates. A typical single spore germinates into a monokaryotic mycelium, which cannot reproduce sexually; when two compatible monokaryotic mycelia join and form a dikaryotic mycelium, that mycelium may form fruiting bodies such as mushrooms. A mycelium may be minute, forming a colony that is too small to see, or may grow to span thousands of acres as in Armillaria.
Cultured meat, also known as cultivated meat among other names, is a form of cellular agriculture where meat is produced by culturing animal cells in vitro. Cultured meat is produced using tissue engineering techniques pioneered in regenerative medicine. Jason Matheny popularized the concept in the early 2000s after he co-authored a paper on cultured meat production and created New Harvest, the world's first non-profit organization dedicated to in-vitro meat research. Cultured meat has the potential to mitigate the environmental impact of meat production and address issues regarding animal welfare, food security and human health.
Fur clothing is clothing made from the preserved skins of mammals. Fur is one of the oldest forms of clothing and is thought to have been widely used by people for at least 120,000 years. The term 'fur' is often used to refer to a specific item of clothing such as a coat, wrap, or shawl made from the fur of animals.
Oeko-Tex is a registered trade mark of the International Association for Research and Testing in the Field of Textile and Leather Ecology. It is used to represent the product labels and company certificates issued by the Association.
Textile recycling is the process of recovering fiber, yarn, or fabric and reprocessing the material into new, useful products. Textile waste is split into pre-consumer and post-consumer waste and is sorted into five different categories derived from a pyramid model. Textiles can be either reused or mechanically/chemically recycled.
Biotextiles are specialized materials engineered from natural or synthetic fibers. These textiles are designed to interact with biological systems, offering properties such as biocompatibility, porosity, and mechanical strength or are designed to be environmentally friendly for typical household applications. There are several uses for biotextiles since they are a broad category. The most common uses are for medical or household use. However, this term may also refer to textiles constructed from biological waste product. These biotextiles are not typically used for industrial purposes.
Biobased economy, bioeconomy or biotechonomy is economic activity involving the use of biotechnology and biomass in the production of goods, services, or energy. The terms are widely used by regional development agencies, national and international organizations, and biotechnology companies. They are closely linked to the evolution of the biotechnology industry and the capacity to study, understand, and manipulate genetic material that has been possible due to scientific research and technological development. This includes the application of scientific and technological developments to agriculture, health, chemical, and energy industries.
Upcycling, also known as creative reuse, is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless, or unwanted products into new materials or products perceived to be of greater quality, such as artistic value or environmental value.
Sustainable fashion is a term describing efforts within the fashion industry to reduce its environmental impacts, protect workers producing garments, and uphold animal welfare. Sustainability in fashion encompasses a wide range of factors, including cutting CO2 emissions, addressing overproduction, reducing pollution and waste, supporting biodiversity, and ensuring that garment workers are paid a fair wage and have safe working conditions.
Suzanne Lee is a Brooklyn, New York based fashion designer working on fashion and future technologies.
AMSilk is an industrial supplier of synthetic silk biopolymers. The polymers are biocompatible and breathable. The company was founded in 2008 and has its headquarters at Campus Neuried in Munich. AMSilk is an industrial biotechnology company with a proprietary production process for their silk materials.
Cellular agriculture focuses on the production of agricultural products from cell cultures using a combination of biotechnology, tissue engineering, molecular biology, and synthetic biology to create and design new methods of producing proteins, fats, and tissues that would otherwise come from traditional agriculture. Most of the industry is focused on animal products such as meat, milk, and eggs, produced in cell culture rather than raising and slaughtering farmed livestock which is associated with substantial global problems of detrimental environmental impacts, animal welfare, food security and human health. Cellular agriculture is a field of the biobased economy. The most well known cellular agriculture concept is cultured meat.
Gabor Forgacs is a Hungarian theoretical physicist turned bioengineer turned innovator and entrepreneur. He was educated in Hungary, where he earned a MS and a PhD in theoretical physics at the Lorand Eotvos University in Budapest, respectively, in 1972 and in 1976. He started his scientific career at the Central Research Institute for Physics in Budapest in condensed matter physics under the supervision of Alfred Zawadowsky. In 1978 he became the Candidate of Physical Sciences title awarded by the Hungarian National Academy. in 1978 he joined Dr. Harry Frisch at the State University of New York in Albany as a Postdoctoral Fellow and in 1979 moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the group of Professor Michael Wortis. In 1981 he returned to the Central Research Institute for Physics in Budapest. In 1984-1986 he worked in the Theoretical Physics Laboratory at the Commissariat d'Energie Atomique (CEA) Saclay France. In 1988 he returned to the USA as Professor of Physics at Clarkson University, Potsdam NY. By 1992 he completed his studies in Biology, in particular the Embryology course at the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole and started contributing to the establishment of the new discipline of Biological Physics. In the same year he became the Doctor of Physical Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1999 he was named the George H. Vineyard Chair Professor of Biological Physics at the University of Missouri, Columbia (UMC), where he established a Biological Physics Group at the Department of Physics and Astronomy. It is during his years at UMC that he started his entrepreneurial activity, when he started Organovo in 2007, the first company in the space of bioprinting. In 2010 he returned to Clarkson University as the Czanderna-Storky Chair Professor of Physics and the Executive Director of the Shipley Center for Innovation. In 2011 he co-founded the company Modern Meadow that focuses on biofabricated biomaterials and served as its Chief Scientific Officer until 2016. In 2018 he co-founded the company Fork & Goode to produce cell-based meat and at present serves as its Chief Scientific Officer.
Finless Foods, or Finless for short, is an American biotechnology company aimed at cultured fish, particularly bluefin tuna.
National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) is an autonomous institute offering courses in fashion, technology, and management. Its head office is located in New Delhi, India.
Microgravity bioprinting is the utilization of 3D bioprinting techniques under microgravity conditions to fabricate highly complex, functional tissue and organ structures. The zero gravity environment circumvents some of the current limitations of bioprinting on Earth including magnetic field disruption and biostructure retention during the printing process. Microgravity bioprinting is one of the initial steps to advancing in space exploration and colonization while furthering the possibilities of regenerative medicine.
Fungi are a common theme and working material in art. Fungi appear in nearly all art forms, including literature, paintings, and graphic arts; and more recently, contemporary art, music, photography, comic books, sculptures, video games, dance, cuisine, architecture, fashion, and design. There are some exhibitions dedicated to fungi, as well as an entire museum.
Plant-based leather, also known as vegan leather or eco-leather, is a type of material made from plant-based sources as an alternative to traditional leather, which is typically made from animal hides. Plant-based leather can be made from a variety of sources, including pineapple leaves, mushrooms, corn, apple peels, and recycled plastic. The growing interest in sustainable and environmentally friendly products has led to increased demand for plant-based leather in recent years.
von Holzhausen is a textile material innovation company based in Los Angeles, California. The company uses plants, recycled fibers, and biodegradable materials to create sustainable materials at scale.