Cracking the Cultivated Meat Code — One Cell Twin at a Time

Courtesy: Gourmey - ph. Romain Buisson

Gourmey, the Paris-based cultivated meat company, has entered into a strategic partnership with AI biology firm DeepLife to create what they claim is the world’s first avian digital twin — a virtual model of poultry cells designed to optimize how cultivated meat is produced. Announced on June 26, 2025, the collaboration reflects a growing trend in the industry: using software and simulation to reduce production costs and accelerate development timelines at a time when few cultivated meat companies have reached commercial viability.

The partnership centers on combining Gourmey’s proprietary cell cultivation platform with DeepLife’s cellular modeling engine to simulate how avian cells behave under different environmental and nutritional conditions. This includes cultivated duck and chicken, with the digital twin providing a tool for predicting outcomes before any physical experiments take place.

“Digital twins are not just a futuristic concept — they’re a strategic necessity,” said Nicolas Morin-Forest, CEO of Gourmey. “We can now model how our avian cells react to specific nutrients or stress conditions, which lets us pre-optimize for yield, taste, and texture long before we touch a pipette.”

The integration comes at a time when many cultivated meat startups are seeking more capital-efficient ways to scale. Traditional R&D relies heavily on trial-and-error experimentation and expensive bioreactor infrastructure. DeepLife’s platform allows companies to run thousands of virtual experiments to fine-tune variables like feed composition, protein yield, and flavor expression, narrowing down the most promising conditions before moving to the lab.

Gourmey and Deep Life teams

“This isn’t just a new biotech innovation,” said Jonathan Baptista, CEO of DeepLife. “It’s the first step toward a digitally native approach to cultivated meat. And we are delighted to partner with Gourmey to shape this emerging category.”

The digital twin is already influencing how Gourmey approaches scale-up. A 2025 techno-economic assessment conducted by Arthur D. Little validated Gourmey’s production system at €7 per kilogram ($3.43/lb) for cultivated meat at a 5,000-liter scale. The report, which used no pharmaceutical-grade inputs or scaffolds, is the lowest-cost model independently validated to date. The ability to simulate cellular behavior at a genomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic level gives the company another layer of precision — not just to cut costs, but to meet regulatory and consumer standards for consistency and safety.

With applications under review in Europe, the U.S., and Asia, Gourmey is using the platform to improve both product attributes and compliance documentation. This includes tuning fat structures, enhancing umami notes, and optimizing nutrient density in line with food safety and labeling guidelines.

The research underlying the collaboration has been submitted for peer review and is publicly available on BioRxiv. While the immediate focus is on avian species, the technology is designed to be adaptable across different cell types and product categories, opening the door to broader applications in the future.

As cultivated meat transitions from pilot stage to early market entry, the DeepLife-Gourmey collaboration offers a signal of how the sector may evolve — not by building larger reactors or adding more capital, but by leveraging simulation and software to make smarter decisions from the start.

The message is clear: the next phase of cultivated meat may be designed not just in bioreactors, but in code.