Leiden University-led FungCows project wins grant to develop fungal casein for vegan cheese

Leiden University researchers and their partners have been awarded €1.3 million (US$1.5 million) to develop milk proteins for vegan cheese using fungi, in a project that aimed to test whether a new fungal host could make casein production cheaper and more sustainable than existing precision fermentation approaches.

• Leiden University and its partners were awarded €1.3 million (US$1.5 million) for the FungCows project to develop cow-free casein for vegan cheese using fungi.
• The consortium said the project focused on an undisclosed fungus that had not previously been used to produce casein and that could grow on grass as a low-cost carbon source.
• Researchers said substantial lab work still remained, and estimated it would take at least four years before cheeses made with the fungus could be sampled.

The grant went to the FungCows consortium, short for Fungal Cell Factories for generation of cow-free products, and came from the Dutch Research Council’s National Growth Fund for Cellular Agriculture and the Dutch Cellular Agriculture Foundation. The program was set up to support the country’s emerging cultivated meat and precision fermentation sector.

At the center of the project was a familiar scientific idea with a new technical twist. The consortium was researching how fungi could be engineered to produce caseins, the proteins in milk that play a central role in cheesemaking. Those proteins are not naturally produced by the fungus being studied, but researchers said that by adding a piece of DNA, the organism could be enabled to make them. From there, the challenge shifted to improving how efficiently that happened.

While precision fermentation has already been widely used to program microorganisms to produce specific proteins, fats, and flavors, the novelty here lay in the choice of fungus. The consortium did not disclose its name, but said it had never before been used to produce casein.

Arthur Ram, Professor of Fungal Genetics and Biotechnology and the project’s principal investigator, said the work would require fresh development on multiple fronts. “We need to further develop the genetic and fermentation techniques for this fungus,” he said.

That focus on a new host mattered because the researchers believed it could open up a more economical production route. One of the project’s main claims was that the fungus could grow on grass, which the consortium described as a cheaper carbon source than those used by other fungi. If that worked at scale, it could help reduce feedstock costs, one of the biggest pressure points in precision fermentation.

Ram also argued that the environmental case could be significant. “This cheesemaking method also has a smaller carbon footprint than the method using cow’s milk,” he said. “Cows need large amounts of space, eat and drink a lot and emit a large quantity of CO2. Globally, there are many regions where intensive agriculture is not feasible, but where grass can grow that can be used for this fungus.”

That point cut to a broader ambition behind the project. By using grass as an input, the consortium suggested fungal casein production could avoid competing directly with food crops grown on more valuable agricultural land. In theory, that could make the process more attractive in regions where traditional dairy production or intensive crop cultivation was less practical.

Still, the researchers made clear that the project remained at a relatively early stage. Considerable lab work was still needed before any cheese made with the fungus would be ready for supermarket shelves. The scientific task was not just to get the fungus to produce casein, but to ensure it did so reliably and at commercially relevant yields.

That work was spread across several partners. Leiden researchers were working with biotech company Bioscienz on the genetic modification of the fungi. Avans University of Applied Sciences was contributing bioinformatics methods to analyze how the fungus responded to the production of animal proteins. The goal was to understand the organism’s behavior in enough detail to optimize its performance.

HAN University of Applied Sciences, through HAN Biocentre, was tasked with optimizing the fermentation process itself. That included selecting the most suitable growth medium and fermentation conditions to support strong growth in the bioreactor and maximize protein output. Biotechnology Fermentation Facility was responsible for the scale-up side, with the longer-term aim of enabling Those Vegan Cowboys to bring cheese made with the resulting proteins to market.

Ram said that timeline would not be short. He expected it to take at least four years before cheeses made with this fungus could be sampled.

For Ram, the project also marked a notable scientific step beyond established fungal systems. “I’ve got over 25 years of experience working with model fungi [a species that has already been studied intensively],” he said. “Discovering a new host is a huge challenge. And it’s exciting to work with partners and companies to apply the knowledge we’ve built up over the years to the development of vegan cheese.”

The project added another example of how European researchers and companies were pushing precision fermentation beyond familiar microbial workhorses in search of more specialized and potentially lower-cost production platforms. In FungCows’ case, the bet was that a little-known fungus, paired with the right genetic and fermentation tools, could eventually help produce dairy proteins without the cow.