Over the last few days 150 leaders in cultured meat descended on Maastricht for the 4th International Conference on Cultured Meat.

 The conference, which was held in the beautiful surrounds of La Bonbonniere in the historic city centre, mostly focussed on technical science. Prof Mark Post, who led the conference, wanted to bring together scientists in medical and other adjacent fields who might not realise that their technologies could be applied to cultured meat with important results.

 We had the opportunity to hear Prof Dr Petra Kluger discuss the latest work on fat tissue engineering, and Dr Pim Pijnappel on the challenge of cell selection. We also got an industry view – for example, Dr Jianan Fu from PAN-Biotech (a cell culture medium manufacturer) spoke about the challenges they see in developing and scaling up optimised media.

 There were also some fascinating social science presentations, including a panel where Chris Green of Harvard Law School, Elizabeth Derbes of the Good Food Institute and Karin Verzeijden from Axon Lawyers discussed the regulatory landscape in the US, Europe and around the world (and were all encouragingly optimistic!).

 If you’d be interested in joining next year’s conference then please save the date! The 5th International Conference on Cultured Meat will be held in Maastricht from 6-8 October 2019 (more information to follow next year).