Real Vegan Cheese

Real Vegan Cheese is a non-profit research project that uses synthetic biology and cellular agriculture techniques to produce milk proteins with yeast and bacteria to make cheese without animals, also known as clean milk. Contributions to the project come from biohackers and citizen scientists at two community labs, Counter Culture Labs in Oakland, California, and BioCurious in Sunnyvale, California. Real Vegan Cheese projects focus on casein protein production, making cheese from recombinant casein, cheese ripening and flavor, public engagement in food technology, an open-science business model, and narwhal genomics.

Real Vegan Cheese won a gold medal and best of track trophy in 2014 in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. The team engineering baker's yeast cells to produce milk proteins such as casein which changes structure in cheese formation. Eleven proteins will form the foundation of their cheese. Yeast, genetically engineered yeast to include the genes coding from these proteins, will be fed carbohydrates and excrete milk. The complete recipe will also include substitutes for animal fat and milk sugar (lactose), essential cheese ingredients that will need to come from vegan sources. The Real Vegan Cheese production process claims to be more sustainable than the standard cheese-making process and can reduce the carbon footprint due to not using methane-producing cows.

The same basic principles could be applied to make milk from any other animal casein proteins. For example, human breast milk may provide an option to people with allergies to non-human dairy products. The human milk project was put on hold due to concerns about possible autoimmune reactions, by Food and Drug Administration. Real Vegan Cheese plans to make its cheese recipe available for anyone to make at home. In 2021, Real Vegan Cheese was reported to have plans to launch its first product in late 2023.

In 2018, the team secured private funding, which led to the production of four cheese proteins, alpha-s1, alpha-s2, beta casein, and kappa casein. The group is working on reconstituting milk and cheesemaking experiments with these milk proteins in combination with other ingredients, such as plant-based fat and sugar. Kappa casein has been used to create a mozzarella-like cheese. Alpha-s1, alpha-s2, beta casein, and kappa casein were purified in E. coli, which resulted in higher expression of these proteins compared with their original production hosts, budding yeast (Pichia pastoris), and baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisie). These milk proteins are being investigated in milk reconstitution experiments and cheese curd formation.

The Narwhal Genomics Project was part of Real Vegan Cheese’s 2014 Indiegogo campaign, in which the team jokingly hypothesized about making cheese out of recombinant Narwhal caseins. The original goal was expressing and purifying narwhal casein proteins that could go into narwhal cheese. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, the group performed in silico projects on casein gene cluster evolution, and tooth development genes were pursued (casein genes evolved from tooth development genes early in the evolution of mammals).

Real Vegan Cheese filed third-party observations on a patent application at the European Patent Office (EPO) by the biotechnology company Perfect Day for recombinant milk proteins, arguing that it was not novel and not patentable

Real Vegan Cheese's Indiegogo launch video from 2014