Is lab-grown meat made from cancer cells?

The objection

“It’s grown from cancer cells in a vat. Eat that and you’re asking for tumours.”

The answer

The fear comes from the word “immortalised”. Some cultivated, or lab-grown, meat is made from immortalised cell lines, meaning cells that have escaped the limit on how many times an ordinary cell can divide, either through genetic changes that build up while they are cultured or through added genes [1]. Dividing without end is one of cancer’s traits, and the scare treats it as the whole disease.

Are immortalised cells the same as cancer cells?

Immortalised cells are not the same as cancer cells, because unlimited division is only one of the traits that make a cell cancerous: as the fact-checkers at Science Feedback set out in 2023, cancer cells must also be able to grow new blood vessels and invade neighbouring tissue [2]. In the words of the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that promotes alternative proteins, “all cancers are immortalized, not all immortalized cells are cancer” [1]. The institute sets the chaotic, uncontrolled growth of cancer against what a producer needs, which is cells that multiply fast under tight control, stay stable and respond to signals, then mature into a specialised cell type, and it says the unstable behaviour of cancer cells would make designing a reliable production process “highly difficult” [1].

Joe Regenstein, an emeritus professor of food science at Cornell University in the US, told the news agency AFP that immortalised cells are “essentially the exact opposite of cancer cells”, because they are “highly controlled and repeatable” [2]. Not every product uses immortalised cells: Aleph Farms’ beef, whose approval in Israel was announced in January 2024, is made from “non-modified, non-immortalized” cow cells [3].

Could eating cultivated meat give you cancer?

No study has shown that eating cultivated meat causes cancer: when the UK fact-checker Full Fact looked into claims in 2024 that lab-grown meat causes “turbo-cancer”, it found none, and “many good reasons” to think it causes no cancer of any kind [4]. A 2023 food-safety report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization (WHO), as quoted by Science Feedback, lists what a cell from the food would have to do to cause harm: stay alive after leaving the bioreactor, survive harvesting, processing, cold storage, cooking and digestion, cross the gut lining, enter the bloodstream, evade the immune system and then multiply in the body [2]. Science Feedback, summarising the report, calls the chance of a living cell from the food getting into the body “extremely low” [2], and the Good Food Institute adds that no case has been documented of cancer passing to anyone who ate cancerous cells or tissue from animals [1]. That reassurance rests on biology and on the lack of any recorded harm. Cultivated meat was first approved for sale only in December 2020 [3], too recently for long-term data on people eating it, and the Good Food Institute, while saying the evidence suggests immortalised cell lines in general are safe, still advises further research into any food-safety hazards from immortalisation or from the cells’ own products [1].

The meat already in the shops is where a cancer link has been shown. The WHO lists processed meat as “carcinogenic to humans”, because eating it causes colorectal (bowel) cancer, and red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans”, a class in which the evidence is “not definitive” [5].

Did regulators check the immortalised cells?

US regulators reviewed the immortalised chicken cells of Upside Foods and Good Meat before either firm was allowed to sell cultivated chicken. Upside Foods reportedly added a gene, for the enzyme telomerase reverse transcriptase, according to a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) memo that Science Feedback cites, while Good Meat selected cells with a greater capacity to multiply; methods like these let cells divide indefinitely while keeping “the features and behavior of the original cells”, and Science Feedback concludes that cells immortalised this way are not cancerous [2]. The FDA completed pre-market consultations on cultivated chicken in November 2022 and, for Good Meat, in March 2023 [6], and in June 2023 the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) backed both firms to sell it [3]. Science Feedback adds that the USDA does not allow meat containing “cancerous lesions or tumors” into commerce, so US regulators would not have approved a product made of such cells [2]. Regulators in Singapore and Israel have approved cultivated meat too [3], and the safety reviews behind each approval and where you can buy it have their own pages.