A UK biotech company is turning heads with its latest engineering feat — lab-grown horse leather.
3D Bio-Tissues (3DBT) unveiled samples of its leather at the Future Fabrics Expo in London earlier this year.
The company says it’s leather, which takes six weeks to grow in a lab, is created using cells isolated and collected from an adult female horse. They add City-mix, a patented serum-free and animal-free cell culture food supplement, to accelerate tissue production.
The end result is a lab-grown leather that’s structurally and genetically identical to traditional leather, 3DBT says.
Che Connon, managing director for BSF Enterprise, which owns 3DBT, says you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between their lab-grown leather and genuine animal leather.
“It has a nice robustness to it,” he says. “It will wear the same as leather, it will have the same visual appeal, the patination, the way that it marks and the way that it ages — all of those things will be there as they are in traditional leather.”
That’s because it’s still made from 100% animal tissue, he says. However, no animals are slaughtered to make it. And, with eco-tanning methods, the impact on the environment is minimal.
Leather International Magazine, which profiled the project in September, says the benefits to lab-grown leather go beyond issues of ethics and sustainability. “Animal skins and hides are limited by the size, skin thickness, and life of that animal, leading to inconsistencies and imperfections in the final leather. In contrast, lab-grown leather production can be more consistent, featuring uniform composition and thickness, free of natural imperfections, and can be scaled to produce a larger material,” the magazine wrote.
For now, 3DBT is targeting luxury fashion brands, but it’s only a matter of time before they come for the automotive industry too.
Could lab-grown leather be the answer to the longstanding debate between proponents of faux and genuine leather?
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