Synthetic Biology
The year 2025 will be remembered as the year synthetic biology stopped being a laboratory curiosity and became a commercial reality. Seven companies now have regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat products across three countries. The Food and Drug Administration issued multiple approvals for precision fermentation ingredients, clearing proteins produced in yeast and bacteria for use in food. Venture capital flooded into the sector: seventeen billion dollars in 2025, triple the amount invested three years earlier. The precision fermentation market alone reached four billion dollars and is projected to grow at over forty percent annually for the next decade.
These are not incremental developments. They represent a threshold crossing. For decades, synthetic biology was the promise of a revolution. In 2025, the revolution began delivering products to consumers. The technology that once cost three hundred thousand dollars to produce a single hamburger patty now produces food that people actually eat in restaurants in San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, and Washington.
This article documents what happened in 2025: the regulatory approvals, the scientific advances, the commercial milestones, and the persistent challenges. It is a snapshot of a field in transition, caught between the laboratory and the supermarket, between proof of concept and mass production.
The Regulatory Watershed
Regulatory approval is the gatekeeper of the food industry. A technology can work perfectly in the laboratory, but if regulators do not approve it for sale, consumers will never see it. For years, cultivated meat and precision fermentation companies waited for regulatory clarity. In 2025, they got it.
The most significant development was the expansion of approved cultivated meat products in the United States. UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat had received approval to sell cultivated chicken in 2023, becoming the first companies to cross that threshold. In 2025, the list grew. Wildtype received approval for cultivated salmon, the first seafood product cleared for sale. Mission Barns received approval for cultivated pork fat, enabling a new category of hybrid products that combine cultivated fat with plant-based protein. Believer Meats completed the federal regulatory process for cultivated chicken, adding another producer to the domestic market.
Each approval followed the same regulatory pathway. Under the 2019 agreement between the Food and Drug Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture, the FDA reviews the cell collection, growth, and differentiation processes. If the FDA has no questions, it issues a letter saying so. Oversight then transfers to the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, which handles harvesting, processing, packaging, and labeling. For seafood other than catfish, the FDA retains sole authority throughout the process.
The system is cumbersome but functional. Companies have learned to navigate it. The expanding list of approvals suggests that the regulatory framework, whatever its inefficiencies, does not pose an insurmountable barrier. What was once an existential uncertainty for the industry has become a procedural challenge.
Internationally, the picture is similarly encouraging. Australia approved cultivated meat for the first time in 2025. Food Standards Australia New Zealand cleared Vow's cultivated quail for sale, allowing the Sydney-based company to sell in its home market a product it had already launched in Singapore. Singapore itself continued to approve new products, including PARIMA's cultivated chicken and the first cultivated pet food. Four companies are now authorized to sell cultivated products in the city-state, making it the most permissive jurisdiction in the world.
The European Union moves more slowly, as it does on most regulatory matters. Applications from Gourmey and Mosa Meat are under review but have not yet been decided. The United Kingdom launched a two-year research program intended to establish safety standards, signaling an intent to eventually permit sales. The regulatory map remains uneven, but the direction is toward greater acceptance rather than greater restriction.
Precision Fermentation Accelerates
While cultivated meat attracts headlines, precision fermentation may be the more consequential technology in the near term. Its regulatory pathway is simpler, its manufacturing challenges are less severe, and its products have already reached commercial scale.
The FDA issued multiple approvals for precision fermentation ingredients in 2025. Verley, a French biotechnology company, received a "no questions" letter for two dairy proteins produced through fermentation. Oobli received its third approval for brazzein-54, a sweet protein derived from the oubli fruit, making it the only commercial supplier of sweet proteins with FDA clearance. Onego Bio received approval for Bioalbumen, an egg white protein produced in yeast, clearing the way for its use in food and beverages.
Each of these approvals adds to a growing list of fermentation-derived ingredients that food manufacturers can now use. The category includes dairy proteins, egg proteins, sweet proteins, enzymes, and flavoring agents. Unlike cultivated meat, which competes directly with conventional products as a finished food, precision fermentation ingredients typically serve as components in processed foods. They replace animal-derived ingredients in formulations, enabling products that are functionally similar to conventional versions but require no animals to produce.
The economics of precision fermentation have reached viability for certain applications. Producing specific proteins through fermentation can cost less than extracting them from animal sources, especially when the target molecule is present in low concentrations in the animal. The heme protein that gives Impossible Foods' burgers their meaty flavor would be prohibitively expensive to extract from plant roots. Producing it in yeast costs a fraction as much. The same logic applies to specialty dairy proteins, collagen for cosmetics, and enzymes for food processing.
Market projections for precision fermentation are aggressive but grounded in observable trends. The industry was valued at roughly four billion dollars in 2024. Analysts project thirty-six billion by 2030 and one hundred fifty billion by 2034. These figures imply compound annual growth rates above forty percent sustained for a decade. Such projections should be viewed skeptically, but they reflect the trajectory of regulatory approvals, investment, and commercial launches.
The Investment Surge
Money follows momentum, and synthetic biology had momentum in 2025. Venture capital investment in the sector reached seventeen billion dollars, triple the level of 2022. The increase came after a difficult period for the industry. In 2023 and 2024, several high-profile companies struggled. Natron Energy, a sodium-ion battery startup, collapsed barely a year after announcing plans for a massive manufacturing facility. Investment had cooled as the gap between laboratory success and commercial viability became apparent.
What changed in 2025 was the visibility of commercial products. Investors had heard about cultivated meat for years. Now they could eat it. They had heard about precision fermentation for years. Now they could buy products that used fermentation-derived ingredients. The transition from promise to product changed the investment calculus.
The major investors in synthetic biology read like a list of technology venture capital. DCVC Bio, which had led Zymergen's restructuring after that company's difficulties, backed three fermentation companies in 2025. Lux Capital funded Synonym's thirty-million-dollar Series A for cell-free manufacturing. Breakthrough Energy Ventures led LanzaTech's funding at a valuation exceeding two billion dollars. Khosla Ventures continued its long-standing commitment to the sector.
The pattern is familiar from other technology transitions. Early investors take risks on unproven concepts. Many of those bets fail. The survivors reach commercial viability and attract larger investments from later-stage investors. The difference with synthetic biology is the length of the cycle. From Mark Post's first cultivated burger in 2013 to commercial sales in 2023 took a decade. From the founding of Impossible Foods in 2011 to regulatory approval for its heme ingredient took years of uncertainty. The technology cycle in biology is slower than in software because biological systems are inherently more complex and regulatory requirements more stringent.
That said, the investment surge of 2025 reflects confidence that the hardest part may be over. The regulatory pathways exist. The technology works at scale. The remaining challenges are engineering and commercialization, problems that money and effort can solve. Whether that confidence proves justified remains to be seen.
The Companies
Understanding synthetic biology requires understanding the companies building it. They differ in technology, strategy, and stage of development.
UPSIDE Foods remains the most prominent cultivated meat company in the United States. Founded as Memphis Meats in 2015, it was the first company built specifically around the technology. It received the first FDA "no questions" letter for cultivated meat and launched the first commercial sales at a San Francisco restaurant. Its cultivated chicken has served as the proof of concept for the entire industry. The company has raised over five hundred million dollars and built production facilities specifically designed for animal cell culture.
GOOD Meat, a division of Eat Just, took a different path to market. The company achieved the first regulatory approval anywhere in the world when Singapore cleared its cultivated chicken in December 2020. It has since expanded production and continued serving cultivated chicken in Singapore while pursuing U.S. approval, which it received in 2023. The company's strategy of pursuing international approval first provided valuable experience with regulatory processes before engaging with U.S. agencies.
Wildtype focused on seafood, specifically salmon. The company received FDA approval in 2025, making its cultivated salmon the first seafood product cleared for sale in the United States. Seafood faces a simpler regulatory pathway because it falls entirely under FDA jurisdiction rather than requiring coordination with the USDA. Wildtype launched its product at a Portland restaurant, initially serving cultivated salmon on Thursday evenings before expanding to daily availability.
Mission Barns took yet another approach, focusing not on whole cuts of meat but on cultivated fat. Fat contributes significantly to the flavor and texture of meat. Mission Barns produces pork fat in bioreactors and combines it with plant-based protein to create hybrid products like meatballs and bacon. This approach sidesteps some of the complexity of growing structured muscle tissue while still using cultivated animal cells.
Vow, based in Sydney, pursued cultivated quail rather than the chicken or beef that dominates the industry. The company launched its product in Singapore in 2024 and received Australian approval in 2025. Vow has demonstrated production at meaningful scale, producing over twelve hundred pounds of cultivated quail in a single week. Its choice of a less common species may reflect a strategy of differentiation: rather than competing directly with cheap conventional chicken, it offers a product with no close conventional equivalent.
On the precision fermentation side, Perfect Day has become the standard-bearer. The company produces dairy proteins, casein and whey, through fermentation and licenses those proteins to food manufacturers. Products made with Perfect Day proteins include ice cream, cream cheese, and protein bars. The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and operates at commercial scale.
Impossible Foods, though primarily known as a plant-based meat company, depends on precision fermentation for its key ingredient. The heme protein that gives Impossible Burgers their distinctive flavor is produced in yeast. Without fermentation, the product would not exist in its current form. Impossible Foods thus straddles the boundary between plant-based and fermentation-derived products.
The Every Company makes egg proteins through fermentation, enabling products that replicate the functionality of eggs without the chickens. Geltor produces collagen for cosmetics and food. Oobli produces sweet proteins that offer sweetness without sugar or artificial sweeteners. Each company has found a specific application where fermentation offers advantages over conventional production.
The Science
Behind the commercial developments, scientific research continues to advance the underlying technologies. The academic literature of 2025 reflects an industry moving from feasibility demonstrations to optimization.
Cell culture media remains a focus of intensive research. Growing animal cells outside the body requires providing them with nutrients, growth factors, and signaling molecules that they would normally receive from blood. For decades, the standard ingredient was fetal bovine serum, extracted from the fetuses of slaughtered cattle. The industry has moved away from this source for both ethical and practical reasons. Serum varies from batch to batch, introduces potential contamination, and contradicts the ethical claims of cultivated meat.
Replacing serum required understanding exactly what cells need and producing those components through other means. Research published in 2025 documented fully animal-free media that support comparable cell growth to serum-containing media. These media are more consistent and eliminate ethical concerns, though they remain more expensive. The cost differential is narrowing as production scales and as precision fermentation makes growth factors cheaper to produce.
Bioreactor design has also advanced. Animal cells are more fragile than the bacteria or yeast used in traditional fermentation. They cannot tolerate the vigorous stirring and aggressive aeration that maximize oxygen transfer in microbial bioreactors. Research has explored alternative designs: airlift reactors that circulate media with gentle bubbles, perfusion systems that continuously remove waste and add nutrients, and novel configurations that minimize shear stress while maintaining adequate mixing.
One significant finding is that optimal bioreactor size may be smaller than initially assumed. Early industry visions imagined massive tanks, hundreds of thousands of liters, achieving economies of scale through sheer volume. Research suggests that around fifty thousand liters may be optimal for current cell lines and growth conditions. Beyond that scale, the challenges of heat transfer, mixing, and oxygen distribution begin to outweigh the benefits of size. This finding supports a distributed manufacturing model with many smaller facilities rather than a few centralized megafactories.
Scaffold technology has matured as well. To produce structured meat products like steaks or whole cuts, cells must grow on some supporting structure that guides their organization. Various materials have been explored: plant-derived cellulose, fungal mycelium, engineered proteins, and synthetic polymers. Each has advantages and limitations. The ideal scaffold provides mechanical support, promotes cell attachment and growth, degrades or integrates safely when consumed, and can be produced economically at scale. Research in 2025 brought several scaffold materials closer to commercial viability.
In precision fermentation, research has focused on strain optimization and process efficiency. The microorganisms that produce target proteins can be engineered to produce more, faster, with fewer inputs. Artificial intelligence tools have accelerated this optimization. Given a target protein, machine learning systems can propose genetic modifications likely to increase yield. Automated laboratory systems can test those proposals without human intervention. The design-build-test-learn cycle that transformed software development is now transforming strain engineering.
The Challenges
Commercial progress should not obscure the challenges that remain. The industry faces obstacles that cannot be solved through additional investment alone.
Cost remains the most fundamental challenge. Cultivated meat sold in restaurants in 2025 is expensive, affordable only at high-end venues where diners pay premium prices for novelty and ethical consumption. Reaching mass-market prices requires reducing production costs by orders of magnitude. Industry projections suggest costs between seventeen and thirty-five dollars per kilogram are achievable in optimized facilities, with some analyses suggesting eventual costs as low as two dollars per kilogram. But these projections depend on assumptions about cell density, growth rates, media costs, and facility utilization that remain unproven at scale.
Scaling from pilot facilities to commercial production introduces challenges that do not exist at small scale. Heat transfer, oxygen distribution, waste removal, contamination control, and mixing all become more difficult as bioreactor volume increases. Companies have built production facilities, but operating them at capacity with consistent quality remains an ongoing effort. The pharmaceutical industry, which has decades of experience with mammalian cell culture, still struggles with manufacturing challenges. The cultivated meat industry is attempting to master those challenges while simultaneously reducing costs to levels the pharmaceutical industry has never approached.
Consumer acceptance presents a different kind of challenge. Surveys suggest that most consumers are willing to try cultivated meat, but willingness to try is not the same as willingness to buy regularly. Taste tests show that while many consumers find cultivated products acceptable, the majority also request improvements. The products are not yet as good as the best conventional alternatives. Price parity will help, but only if product quality reaches parity as well.
The term "lab-grown" has proven particularly problematic. It triggers associations with artificiality and chemical manipulation, even though cultivated meat is made of the same cells as conventional meat. The industry has attempted various alternatives: cultivated meat, cell-cultured meat, no-kill meat. None has achieved universal adoption. Nomenclature may seem trivial, but marketing research consistently shows that how a product is described affects how consumers perceive it.
Political opposition adds another layer of difficulty. In the United States, four states have banned cultivated meat: Florida, Alabama, Texas, and Indiana. These bans reflect the political power of conventional agriculture in those states, but they also reflect genuine cultural unease with food that comes from tanks rather than farms. Legal challenges are underway, but even if the bans are overturned, they signal a broader resistance that the industry must address.
The regulatory environment, while increasingly favorable at the federal level, remains fragmented. A company with FDA and USDA approval still cannot sell its products in Texas. International markets present their own complexities. The European Union's approval process is slow and uncertain. Many countries lack any regulatory framework for cultivated meat, leaving companies unable to even apply for approval.
The Research Landscape
Academic research in synthetic biology has expanded dramatically. The number of papers, the number of researchers, and the amount of funding have all increased. Several trends characterize the 2025 research landscape.
Artificial intelligence has become central to the field. AlphaFold, the protein structure prediction system developed by DeepMind, has transformed how researchers understand proteins. Released in 2020, it has predicted structures for over two hundred million proteins, essentially every protein sequence known to science. Structure prediction is not the same as function prediction, but knowing a protein's shape provides crucial clues about how it works and how it might be modified.
Generative models have extended this capability. Given a desired function, these systems can propose protein sequences that might achieve it. The predictions are not always correct, but they dramatically narrow the search space. Researchers no longer need to screen millions of random variants. They can focus on thousands of computationally promising candidates.
Autonomous laboratory systems have further accelerated the cycle. These systems integrate machine learning with robotic equipment that can synthesize, express, and test proteins without human intervention. A researcher can specify a target and let the system iterate toward it. Published work has demonstrated ninety-fold improvements in enzyme activity using autonomous optimization.
The convergence of AI and biology is perhaps the most significant trend in the field. It is not just that AI tools are helping biologists work faster. AI is changing what kinds of problems are tractable. Designing proteins with specific properties was once a matter of intuition and luck. It is becoming a matter of computation.
Cell-free systems have attracted increasing research attention. By extracting the molecular machinery from cells and running it in vitro, researchers can achieve higher yields, faster reactions, and greater control. The technology is not yet mature for most applications, but its potential is significant. If cell-free production becomes economical, it would bypass many of the challenges of working with living cells.
Research into alternative feedstocks has also expanded. Current precision fermentation typically uses sugars derived from corn or sugarcane. Researchers are exploring other options: cellulose from wood and agricultural waste, carbon gases from industrial emissions, even carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere. Each alternative feedstock would reduce the environmental footprint of fermentation and potentially reduce costs.
Where to Find the Research
For those seeking to follow the field, several resources provide access to current research and industry developments.
The academic literature is distributed across multiple journals. ACS Synthetic Biology publishes fundamental research on engineering biological systems. GEN Biotechnology covers cell-free systems and biomanufacturing. Nature Biotechnology and Science frequently feature significant advances. Preprints appear on bioRxiv before formal publication, providing early access to new findings.
Industry analysis comes from several sources. The Good Food Institute, a nonprofit focused on alternative proteins, publishes detailed reports on cultivated meat, precision fermentation, and plant-based products. These reports include technical assessments, market analyses, and regulatory updates. They are freely available and provide perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the alternative protein sector.
Trade publications track commercial developments. FoodNavigator covers food industry news broadly, with regular reporting on alternative proteins. Vegconomist focuses specifically on plant-based and cultivated products. SynBioBeta covers the synthetic biology industry, including but not limited to food applications.
Patent filings provide insight into what companies are developing. Major cultivated meat and precision fermentation companies file regularly, disclosing technical approaches that may not appear in academic publications. Patent databases are publicly accessible, though interpreting patent claims requires technical expertise.
Investment data indicates where capital is flowing. PitchBook, Crunchbase, and similar databases track funding rounds and valuations. These data are imperfect, as not all investments are publicly disclosed, but they provide a rough guide to which companies and technologies are attracting capital.
What 2025 Means
Every industry has a year when potential becomes reality. For the automobile, it was 1908, when the Model T made cars affordable for ordinary buyers. For the internet, it was 1995, when browsers and commercial service made it accessible to the public. For synthetic biology, 2025 may prove to be that year.
The evidence is circumstantial but suggestive. The regulatory framework now exists and is producing approvals regularly. The technology works at scales beyond the laboratory. Commercial products are available to consumers in multiple countries. Investment has surged, reflecting confidence that the hardest part is behind. The remaining challenges are substantial, but they are engineering challenges rather than fundamental questions of feasibility.
This does not mean success is guaranteed. Many technologies that seemed poised for breakout never achieved it. The path from first commercial sales to mass-market adoption is long and uncertain. Costs must fall further. Quality must improve. Consumer acceptance must be earned. Political opposition must be navigated. Any of these could prove more difficult than currently projected.
But the fact that we are discussing these challenges rather than whether the technology works at all represents a shift. The question is no longer whether cultivated meat is possible. It is whether it can become economical. The question is no longer whether precision fermentation can produce useful proteins. It is whether those proteins can compete with conventional sources at scale.
These are the questions of an emerging industry rather than an emerging technology. The science has advanced enough that the remaining barriers are primarily commercial and political. That is progress, measured in approvals and investments and products served to paying customers.
The synthetic biology industry in 2025 is not yet transformative. It is nascent. But nascent industries become transformative industries. The automobile industry in 1910 was nascent. The smartphone industry in 2008 was nascent. Each became central to how billions of people live. Whether synthetic biology follows that trajectory depends on what happens in the years ahead, but 2025 marked the beginning of that possibility.