Alternative Proteins + Machine Learning: Project Proposals, Seeking Funding

By Noa Weiss @ 2022-12-06T14:43 (+39)

TL;DR:

Ideas

1: Modeling of the extrusion process

What is this?

A physical machine where you put ingredients in, and plant-based meat comes out.

It’s widely used

The vast majority of plant-based meat solutions use this. It is also sometimes used for cultivated (lab-grown) meat.

It’s currently “voodoo” 

Trial and error, mostly unpredictable.

It’s a classic problem for ML

Train a model to guess the result based on given ingredients.

In problems like this, the model often isn’t perfect but does help narrow down the search space significantly (for example, by recognizing that most sets of ingredients “obviously” won’t work)

2: Addressing bottlenecks in Alternative Protein companies using existing research

TL;DR: 

Some bottlenecks I might address

All bottlenecks here are known problems for alternative protein companies, according to the experts I spoke to, but please tell me if I’m wrong. For all problems here, there is at least one scientific paper that seems promising enough to explore (in my opinion). 

  1. Identification of the beginning stages of neural stem cells differentiation into specific cell types
  2. Predicting cell response to different treatments
  3. Identify new potential cell cycle regulatory genes

If you’re an org that could use a solution for one or more of these problems, please get in touch!

Call to action

Contact me

By messaging me here, or emailing [me at weissnoa dot com].

 

 

 Thanks to Yonatan Cale for helping me with this post.

David van Beveren @ 2022-12-06T15:18 (+8)

Hey there, your ideas seem promising, hope you get the support you need. In the meantime, here's a few potentially relevant grant making organizations that may be able to help you, or hopefully, help direct you to other potential funding opportunities more mission aligned.

  1. Food System Research Fund
    1. https://www.fsrfund.org
    2. The Food System Research Fund is a small targeted fund. It aims to facilitate and disseminate research that answers the most pressing questions that can lead to actionable insights to speed a transition away from an animal product-based food system.
  2. The Alternatives Research & Development Foundation
    1. https://www.ardf-online.org
    2. Fund research projects that develop alternative methods to advance science and replace or reduce animal use. Proposals are welcome from any nonprofit educational or research institution worldwide, although there is a preference for U.S. applications.
  3. Animal Advocacy Research Fund
    1. https://researchfund.animalcharityevaluators.org
    2. The introduction of plant-based and cell-cultured protein alternatives has enormous potential to reduce the suffering of farmed animals.

These are just ones that I found that could be relevant to your situation, but feel free to check out this this sheet maintained by Animal Advocacy Africa which may be useful too.

Best of luck!

Noa Weiss @ 2022-12-07T17:41 (+5)

This is extremely helpful, thank you!

David van Beveren @ 2022-12-07T18:26 (+5)

No problem, glad it helped, best of luck!

aogara @ 2022-12-06T17:26 (+4)

Do you think you could advance these goals by working for one of the many companies building alternative proteins? Or are there special benefits to independent work? The latter totally seems possible, but the former would eliminate the need for EA to evaluate and fund the project while still enabling it.

Noa Weiss @ 2022-12-07T17:44 (+5)

My thoughts on this are similar to what Fai wrote. By working for one company, any work I do would only benefit that specific company. My own goal, however, is to solve a bottleneck that applies to many companies in that space, then make it available to all of them, thus having a much higher ROI, impact-wise.

Fai @ 2022-12-07T00:34 (+4)

I thought about using AI/ML to help alternative protein research and thought about whether it is better for talents to work for one of the alt-pro companies, or independently. I think I much prefer to see independent work on this because the research results will be much more likely to be shared among the whole industry. If I am a funder I think I will only consider funding this if this work will be open source.

vincentzh @ 2022-12-08T05:26 (+3)

You probably might have came across it already, but the Good Food Institute (GFI) has compiled a research funding database for alternative proteins (here).

Overall I think having collaborators that have the expertise and facilities to perform biological experiments and bioprocessing may be quite crucial. My experience is that at this moment, publicly available data are scarce and insufficient to support purely computational work  in this field, unlike say cancer research where loads of multi-omics data are available for data mining and modeling.

Noa Weiss @ 2022-12-14T12:05 (+3)

I absolutely agree. Part of my current plan is to do the work required to get that data, through partnerships with the relevant institutes.

jasonk @ 2022-12-06T15:35 (+3)

I'm not sure if you live in Israel - just seeing signs suggesting it on your website - but have you contacted The Modern Agriculture Foundation (https://www.modern-agriculture.org/)? I know they're in touch with many companies locally and may have ideas about funding locally as well.

Noa Weiss @ 2022-12-06T15:48 (+5)

I do live in Israel, and I am now very curious as to what those signs on my website are :)

jasonk @ 2022-12-06T16:40 (+4)

"I lead the Israeli community of Women in Data Science" and videos in Hebrew.  :-)

Noa Weiss @ 2022-12-07T17:39 (+1)

Oh, yeah, that's somewhat of a giveaway  XD