It doesn't appear that you read the article I posted. So here's a quote:

In one key way, though, the report’s authors appear to admit defeat: If the goal is to create a new generation of wildly profitable cultured meat companies, the economics of building full-scale facilities may never pan out.

“The requirements for return on investment need to be set much lower than common practice in commercially motivated investments,” the authors write. In other words, the entities investing in this nascent industry’s growth should have very modest expectations about profit.

Paying off a $450 million facility in an investor-friendly term of four years, GFI’s analysts found, would mean adding $11.25 per kilogram to the cost of cultured meat. But at a repayment term of 30 years, the proposed facility could reduce its capital expenditure cost to about $1.50 per kilo of meat produced—more than a seven-fold reduction, and one that is essential if price parity is ever going to be realized.

The problem is that traditional investors are unlikely to relax their repayment terms so dramatically: They’re in it for the money. The GFI report points out that investors concerned with social causes might be more patient; others, aware of potentially huge payouts down the road, may prove to be more flexible. If investor altruism proves to be in short supply, GFI makes clear that the remaining option is for “government bodies” and “non-profit funders” to shoulder the burden. This can be read as a concession: Cultured meat may never reach price parity on its own terms. It will likely need public or philanthropic support to be competitive.

To be fair, the traditional meat industry already benefits from enormous direct and indirect government subsidies. Still, critics say that GFI may still be significantly underestimating the cost of building and outfitting large-scale cultured meat facilities. Depending on who you listen to, the end result may be a bill that no reasonable investor is willing to foot.

Think of it this way: At a projected $450 million, GFI’s hypothetical facility doesn’t come cheap. But that target is only a rough estimate, and one that would quickly become unrealistic if pharmaceutical-grade practices are used. The GFI report gets around this by assuming that future cultured meat plants will be able to be built to cheaper specifications.

“A key difference in the CE Delft study is that everything was assumed to be food-grade,” Swartz said. That distinction, of whether facilities will be able to operate at food- or pharma-grade specs, will perhaps more than anything determine the future viability of cultivated meat.

The Open Philanthropy report assumes the opposite: that cultivated meat production will need to take place in aseptic “clean rooms” where virtually no contamination exists. For his cost accounting, Humbird projected the need for a Class 8 clean room—an enclosed space where piped-in, purified oxygen blows away threatening particles as masked, hooded workers come in and out, likely through an airlock or sterile gowning room. To meet international standards for airborne particulate matter, the air inside would be replaced at a rate of 10 to 25 times an hour, compared to 2 to 4 times in a conventional building. The area where the cell lines are maintained and seeded would need a Class 6 clean room, an even more intensive specification that runs with an air replacement rate of 90 to 180 times per hour.

The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”

Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.

“There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”

If even a single speck of bacteria can spoil batches and halt production, clean rooms may turn out to be a basic, necessary precondition. It may not matter if governments end up allowing cultured meat facilities to produce at food-grade specs, critics say—cells are so intensely vulnerable that they’ll likely need protection to survive.

“We’re saying, guys, it has to be pharmaceutical-grade because the process is going to demand it,” Wood told me. “It’s not whether someone will allow you [to run at food-grade specs.] It’s just the fact you can’t physically do it.”

Of course, companies could try. But that might be a risky strategy, said Neil Renninger, a chemical engineer who has spent a lot of time around the kind of equipment required for cell culture. Today, he is on the board of Ripple Foods, a dairy alternatives company that he co-founded. Before that, for years, he ran Amyris, a biotechnology company that uses fermentation to produce rare molecules like squalene—an ingredient used in a range of products from cosmetics to cancer therapeutics, but is traditionally sourced unsustainably from shark liver oil.

“Contamination was an issue” at Amyris, he said. “You’re getting down to the level of making sure that individual welds are perfect. Poor welds create little pits in the piping, and bacteria can hide out in those pits, and absolutely ruin fermentation runs.”

If it’s not clear where the breach is, things can get worse quickly. Renninger said biotech companies sometimes need to take an entire plant apart, scrub everything, and put it all back together again to mitigate an issue—a process that can be necessitated by one tiny eddy in a single piece of pipe welding, which can be “incredibly costly” in terms of labor and lost productivity.