Brewing Leather In A Lab

Suzanne Lee was a fashion designer in the early ’90s when she discovered in a lab that biofabrication processes could produce leatherlike materials via yeast fermentation. She spent the next 10 years experimenting with giant vats of bacteria while advising clothing brands on how to incorporate newly invented materials. Recently, as chief creative officer at biotech startup Modern Meadow, she’s helped lead the development of an animal-free leather material called Zoa and is now collaborating with industrial fermentation company Evonik to scale the biofabrication process.

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As the world becomes more affluent, people want more meat and leather products, but the planetary stress is unsustainable. Here, we design and edit DNA, put it into yeast cells, and then use a fermentation process to scale. We can actually brew protein collagen like you brew beer, and use it anywhere that you might use a leather material, whether that’s fashion, interiors, or cars.