There are 18 months between when a patent application is filed and when it becomes publicly available. This means that the current patent landscape is merely a snapshot as of early of 2017. A couple companies have discussed patents applications they have filed that are not yet public, e.g. Mosa Meats [7] the Israeli company Biofood System [8] and Meatables [9]. The provided chart of cell-based meat funding shows that activity in the space has quickly increased in the last two years, meaning there are likely even more patents applications that we don’t have access to.

There could also be important technology in provisional patent applications. Provisional patent applications are an easy way for a company to claim an idea before validating it. They are cheap to file, but they are not reviewed by the USPTO. The company has 12 months to validate the idea and file a normal patent application, which uses the priority date of the provisional application. During these 12 months, the provisional application is not published.

Finally, there could be important technology that companies are keeping as trade secrets. This would be atypical since patents are often major assets in biotech. However, trade secrets might be appealing if a company wants protection for longer than the 20 years that a patent provides.

It can be easy to forget how young the cell-based meat industry is given the amount of attention and hype it receives. As an illustration, Impossible Foods has raised almost $400 million [10], while the entire cell-based meat industry has raised less than $100 million. Impossible Foods has also been doing R&D since 2011, many years before the cell-based meat industry began receiving significant funding. It shouldn’t then be surprising that Impossible Foods also has more public patents than the entire cell-based meat industry. We can also look at the larger cultured materials companies like Spiber, Bolt Threads, and Modern Meadow as indicators of what cell-based meat companies might look like in the future when they’ve had more time and funding. These companies each file multiple patent applications a year [11]. As cell-based meat companies mature, we will likely see significantly more patenting.

Who has the most useful patents?

At this point, it is difficult to say whose patents will prove to be the most useful since relatively little is know about what cell-based meat production will look like at scale. Even if a company’s portfolio seems promising right now, pending patents could be abandoned if they are too broad, and granted patents could be invalidated in court.

That being said, the most pressing challenge right now is bringing down the cost of culturing cells at a large scale, and patents that directly address this seem like they will be the most useful. Future Meat’s patent presents a clear path to lowering cost by culturing fibroblasts in small bioreactors, and using small molecules to induce differentiation. If Future Meat can validate their cost model, they will justify their contrarian strategy and be in a strong position. Integriculture’s patent could also lower costs by reducing the need for recombinant growth factors. Memphis Meats’ patents, if granted, could help lower production costs for GMO meat. In contrast, Modern Meadow’s bioprinting patents don’t directly suggest any way of lowering the cost of culturing cells. The patents might prove useful when the industry is exploring 3D slabs of meat, but in the short term they don’t address the most pressing problems.

Just’s patents are the broadest, and therefore the most potentially powerful. They cover the entire process of cell-based meat production, and have already been granted. They could put Just in a very strong position depending on how aggressive Just is in defending their patents, whether the patents expire before it makes sense to defend them, and whether they prove to be valid if challenged.