Meet the researcher: Boosting alternative protein research at Imperial College London’s new Bezos Centre for Sustainable Proteins with Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro

A new centre based at Imperial College London aims to revolutionise the development of alternative proteins.

12 July 2024.

Dr Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro
Dr Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro

Name: Dr Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro

Job title: Group Leader and Reader in synthetic biology 

Organisation: Imperial College London, Faculty of Engineering 

Sustainable protein specialism: Precision fermentation

A new centre based at Imperial College London aims to revolutionise the development of alternative proteins.

The Bezos Centre for Sustainable Proteins will harness engineering biology – a 21st-century technology that has been used to create mRNA Covid vaccines – to tackle many of the challenges of scaling up cultivated meat, plant-based meat and fermentation-made foods.

Expertise in this technology will be applied to overcoming bottlenecks such as improving the efficiency of protein extraction technologies for plant-based meat, finding new sources of cell culture media to commercialise cultivated meat and developing better microbial strains for fermentation-made products.

Advancing the field

The centre is being led by precision fermentation specialist Dr Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, who says engineering biology has the potential to overcome these obstacles much quicker than existing approaches.

He believes the centre, funded with $30 million from the Bezos Earth Fund and supplemented by contributions from ICL, partner institutions, and others, will also help lift the wider alternative protein research field beyond the issues that have so far held it back. 

While the field is currently being driven by industry, Rodrigo says centres like this will advance academically led, open-access science so innovations can be shared across the entire sector. They can also help overcome another problem – that of silo-based thinking – enabling greater collaboration between scientists and engineers from different disciplines and backgrounds, from food science to AI. 

“As a field, it’s currently very spread out,” he said. “There’s one academic here and one academic there – up until very recently there’s been no one place that brings together all of this research.”

The centre’s academics will work with others from institutions such as Tufts University in the United States, the Technical University of Denmark and the National University of Singapore, as well as having close links with their US counterpart at North Carolina State University – also funded by the Bezos Earth Fund.

Building the UK ecosystem

There will be close links with UK organisations, such as the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub based at the University of Bath and Imperial’s own Microbial Foods Hub – also led by Rodrigo – building on the country’s increasingly mobilised alternative protein scientific ecosystem

At least £86.5 million in public research funding has been committed or invested in the UK to date, and the government’s Department of Science, Engineering and Technology highlighted the role alternative proteins can play in achieving objectives like economic growth in last year’s National Vision for Engineering Biology.

Rodrigo says although the UK may still lag behind other countries in terms of government funding, its strong academic foundation in areas like engineering biology and food science means it is well-positioned for future advances.

An early advocate for precision fermentation’s potential

Rodrigo first understood the potential of precision fermentation to develop sustainable food when he completed a PhD at the University of Salamanca in Spain, using filamentous fungi to produce vitamin B2 through microbial processes — a more sustainable alternative to developing vitamins through traditional chemical synthesis.

“I have always been optimistic about the potential to develop foods with these technologies,” he said. “I was very lucky because, in the place I did my PhD, there was one of the earliest examples of successful precision fermentation making it to the market.”

Following a spell in France, where he worked with the public research body INRAE to produce oils, fatty acids, and food colourants, Rodrigo joined ICL in 2017. There, he has led a research group dedicated to microbial engineering, enabling the manipulation of microorganisms to produce valuable food ingredients such as proteins, lipids, antioxidants, flavour enhancers, aromas and sweeteners. 

Rodrigo says the technology behind engineering biology has changed a lot during his career, with advances making this work much cheaper and more efficient, but an equally significant development is the availability of funding.

“Ten years ago there was not much funding for food-related projects,” he said. “There was a general assumption that fermentation-based products would only be profitable for high-value products such as cosmetics or pharmaceuticals. This has changed now.”

Training the next generation 

Despite the expanding network of researchers, very few education programmes currently focus on alternative proteins, so the new centre will fill this gap by developing courses, workshops, conferences and summer schools to train a new generation of experts.

Rodrigo believes there will be a strong appetite for this, having noticed a rapidly growing interest in alternative proteins among students driven by their environmental benefits. He adds that, with more funding available, there are a growing number of opportunities for researchers in positions ranging from PhDs to internships.

“Alternative proteins are applicable to so many of today’s problems,” he said. “And more and more people interested in wanting to have an impact in the real world will want to get involved in this field.”

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