It’s lunchtime at the San Francisco headquarters of Wildtype. And company founders Justin Kolbeck and Arye Elfenbein, M.D., believe what’s on the menu is nothing short of the future of seafood: thin slices of salmon, not caught in the open ocean, or even farmed in captivity, but instead, grown in their lab.
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The samples are sliced from the cutting edge of an emerging technology known as cell-cultured seafood. For the Wildtype founders, it’s part of a larger mission.
But to appreciate how complex that science is, you might want to journey a few blocks away to Elfenbein’s former life as a trained cardiologist and microbiology researcher at San Francisco’s Gladstone Institutes. That’s where a Nobel Prize-winning team engineered breakthroughs like turning skin cells into pluripotent stem cells — and from there into beating heart cells and other types of human organ tissue. President Deepak Srivastava, M.D., remembers the day Elfenbein came into his office to let him know he was leaving, to turn similar techniques into lab-grown salmon.
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Wildtype salmon will make its Bay Area debut on Aug. 14 on the menu of the sushi restaurant, Robin, in San Francisco.
