Taste of Tomorrow: Lab-Grown Meat & Child-Friendly Medicines

Meat without animal slaughter? Milk without the cow? These might seem possible 100 years from now, but the reality is that these novel foods are already available in Singapore and USA. Cellular Agriculture focuses on production of animal-derived products, but rather than exploiting animals, it uses cell culture technology to make them. This is not a new concept as it was envisaged by visionaries like Winston Churchill who said “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium”.

Many medicines out there aren't made just for kids. Even when they are, they often pack in sugar to hide the yucky taste most drugs have. But in my job, we create medicines just for children. They're simple to swallow, don't taste bad, and we keep the person giving them in mind, too! To be sure our design is spot on, we do tests in the lab to check how the medicine tastes. We use a fancy electronic tongue to compare the taste of the improved medicine to the drug alone, and we even recently started using AI to predict the taste of drugs to reduce the time and cost needed in the lab!