Request for Proposals: GFI Research Grant Program

Donor Name: Good Food Institute (GFI)

Country: Global

Type of Grant: Grant

Deadline: 09/21/2023

Size of the Grant: $350,000

Grant Duration: 24 months

Details:

With the support of several generous donors, GFI’s Research Grant Program is advancing this foundational, open-access research and creating a thriving ecosystem around this game-changing field. Since launching in 2018, GFI’s Research Grant Program has provided yearly opportunities for researchers to apply for rapidly-deployed funding.

Field Catalyst Grants are targeted funding opportunities focused on high-priority scientific and technological topics.

Priority

• Field catalyst funding priority A/Extrusion 2.0: Enhancing traditional extrusion through process innovation and mechanistic evaluations of protein texturization
  • Current challenge
    • Extrusion systems are relatively well established. They have been scaled for high output of up to 500 kg/h and are commercially used with many plant proteins. However, there are opportunities to improve extrusion’s throughput capacity and texturization capabilities.
  • Proposed solution
    • They encourage proposals demonstrating the feasibility of extrusion processing innovations at a pilot scale and including a life-cycle or techno-economic analysis of the processing methodology.
    • Successful proposals will articulate:
      • How they are improving extrusion processing or mechanistic analysis through a novel method. Proposals focused on using traditional extrusion methods to analyze plant proteins or other ingredients will not be accepted without this explanation;
      • Which plant proteins and ingredients will be evaluated;
      • How improved sensory, functional, or nutritional characteristics of the end product will be demonstrated;
      • What the biggest challenge in scaling the methodology is predicted to be.
• Field catalyst funding priority B/Developing tools and knowledge to promote stemness and proliferation in seafood cell cultures
  • Current challenge
    • Reports of continuous myogenic, adipogenic, mesenchymal stem cell (MSC), and embryonic stem cell (ESC)-like lines from fish in academic literature are relatively sparse, and their reported doubling times tend to be long compared to mammalian cell types. Many fish cell lines have doubling times of several days, whereas the doubling time of the C2C12 mouse myoblast line is approximately 20 hours. Long doubling times pose a major challenge to both lab-scale research efforts into cultivated seafood and commercial scale-up efforts.
  • Proposed solution
    • Researchers may employ various strategies to achieve rapid and reliable proliferation of relevant cultivated seafood cell types. These may be broadly categorized based on the production step they most closely align to:
      • Cell line development and optimization: Optimization of the source cells themselves—either by direct manipulation or by selecting for desirable phenotypes within a heterogeneous cell population—may help to produce cell lines with the desired characteristics.
      • Optimization of culture media formulation and culture conditions for proliferation: The most important tools available to researchers attempting to improve proliferation rates and other metrics for cultivated seafood will likely be optimizing culture conditions, especially culture media formulations.
      • Differentiation: By better understanding the differentiation potential of various seafood cell types, additional starting cell types may be added to the menu of possibilities. If easy-to-grow cells such as fibroblasts could be easily transdifferentiated or induced to take on important characteristics of meat-relevant cell types, issues related to cell line development and media optimization may become much more straightforward.
    • They encourage proposals that include basic investigations into cell type identity or the development of novel tools, whether as the primary focus of the proposal or as a means of enabling other experiments.
    • Successful proposals will articulate:
      • How the proposed approach will improve doubling times, metabolic efficiency, and cell line availability, reduce media costs, prevent spontaneous differentiation, or reduce the use of serum and animal-derived media components.
      • What research tools (cell lines, antibodies, annotated genome sequences, etc.) are necessary for the proposed approach, whether these are already available, and if not, how they will be generated.
      • If novel research tools are generated, how they will be made widely available to the cultivated seafood research community.
• Field catalyst funding priority C/Data collection and curation to inform the development of genome-scale metabolic models for optimization of feedstock formulation and feed conversion
  • Current challenge
    • Cell culture media is currently the largest cost and environmental impact driver of cultivated meat production. Life cycle and techno-economic assessments of hypothetical, scaled production of cultivated meat minimize this problem by assuming media will be used efficiently, resulting in scenarios where production could be cost-competitive and have a low environmental impact. In these studies, the cell line’s metabolism is assumed to be optimized for biomass production, and the media composition is assumed to be at least partially optimized to the metabolic requirements of each cell line, thus achieving efficient media use. These assumptions collectively result in a lower feed conversion ratio where media nutrients are efficiently converted into biomass with limited waste.
  • Proposed solution
    • They encourage proposals for either cultivated meat or microbial fermentation that will ensure broad accessibility of any relevant datasets and models by depositing in open databases or repositories. Proposals that include experimental validation with food-grade components and cost modeling are encouraged.
    • Successful proposals will clearly articulate:
      • How the planned work can be used to address gaps in knowledge, improve production processes, or reduce costs for cultivated meat or fermentation;
      • The organism, species, cell type (if relevant), and/or cell state (e.g., proliferation, differentiation) being modeled with justification of selection;
      • The extent to which existing data and models will be leveraged vs. new data and models being created;
      • The methodology to collect relevant data and build models and where these data and models will be housed;
      • A tractable plan for experimental validation of models
• Field catalyst funding priority D/Improving feedstock availability for food fermentation in biomass and precision fermentation platforms
  • Current challenge
    • Currently, the vast majority of fermentation utilizes processed simple sugars as a carbon feedstock for microbial growth and metabolism. However, use of sugars that derive from potential human foodstuffs puts fermentation-derived alternative protein products in competition with other food sources. Further, the progress in fermentation technology is leading to a growing bioeconomy where many bio-based products are produced by fermentation. The potential competition between bio-based commodities will challenge the sustainability, supply chains, and cost-effectiveness of the bio-economy.
  • Proposed solution
    • They encourage proposals demonstrating the feasibility of alternative feedstock innovations in fermentation relevant conditions and/or at a pilot scale and including a life-cycle or techno-economic analysis of the processing methodology. Successful proposals will articulate:
      • Which fermentation microbe and feedstocks will be tested/characterized/developed,
      • The potential for a food-safe fermentation-derived product using the bioprocess,
      • The price, sustainability, availability advantages of the feedstock over the current state of the art,
      • Evidence of metabolic compatibility between the microbe and feedstock, and
      • The technical and biological challenges associated with industrial adoption of the bioprocess.

Funding Information and Duration

• Total budgets (including indirect costs) should be less than or equal to $250,000. As they wish to bring more researchers into the field of alternative proteins, multi-partner proposals may request an additional $100,000 to support collaborations in which at least one of the collaborating partners has not previously worked on alternative protein research.
• The intent of this additional funding is to encourage collaboration and bring new researchers, perspectives, and ideas into the field. Total budgets (including indirect costs) for applicants partnering with such researchers and/or industry stakeholders should not exceed $350,000.
• Duration: Up to 24 months

Eligibility Criteria

• Applications submitted from any sector (academia, government, industry, nonprofits, etc.) and from around the world will be considered. GFI strongly encourages women, racial and ethnic minorities, and other individuals who are under-represented in the alternative protein industry to apply for funding through this RFP.
• Graduate students or postdoctoral researchers may serve as the lead investigator on a project proposal. In this case, GFI may ask for a brief letter of support signed by a faculty member at the student or postdoc’s higher education institution. The letter of support should state the faculty member’s commitment to serve as a project collaborator and advisor and to allow the proposed research to be carried out in their laboratory.
• Lead researchers from projects that have previously been awarded a grant from GFI are eligible to apply to this RFP. Proposals from labs that are currently receiving GFI grant funding are allowed if the lead researcher of the new submission is different from the lead researcher of the previously funded project. GFI strongly encourages proposals from scientists who are new to the alternative protein field or who have not received GFI funding in the past.

Requirements

• Expectations of and specific requirements for award recipients will be explained in the award agreement that must be signed by authorized officials from both GFI and the grantee’s organization prior to receipt of any funding. The basic requirements include but are not limited to:
  • Regular communication with GFI’s Science and Technology team throughout the duration of the project to ensure consistent progress.
  • Disseminating the project results in a publicly accessible manner.
  • Consent to be featured on GFI’s website, blog, and social media with a short description of your project goal(s).
  • A brief written update to GFI upon request to provide brief information regarding project progress, results, and any technical challenges that have arisen.
  • A brief written summary outlining the project outcomes, potential next steps, and final expense report for how funds were utilized must be submitted within 30 days of the conclusion of the project. This summary should also include instructions for accessing data or obtaining research materials generated from the project.

For more information, visit Good Food Institute (GFI).