Love leather, but also animals? This NJ lab is trying to grow leather

Consider your leather shoes, jacket or chair. They're functional, durable and stylish, but their production is fraught with problems. Leather buyers face shortages and animal rights groups say it is destructive and inhumane.

So Andras Forgacs wondered, what if you could make something like leather not from the entire animal, but from cells?

"What we’re trying to do is take inspiration from nature, inspiration from materials that have been widely used for hundreds of years," Forgacs said.

Forgacs is the driving force behind Modern Meadow, a Nutley-based company that is using biotechnology to essentially grow leather in the laboratory.

What seemed like a pie-in-the-sky idea is taking shape. It has moved into 73,000 square feet on the campus once used by the drugmaker Roche. It has lined up more than $50 million in venture capital. And it plans to hire as many as 200 employees within two years. 

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If it succeeds, its impact would be far-reaching. Similar research at other companies is underway to use cell culture technology to make meat. Tanneries and slaughterhouses could give way to production plants that look more like craft breweries. Cows could lead longer, happier lives. See its potential in the video above.

And New Jersey, remarkably, could welcome back an industry that has a long history here. Azariah Crane opened the first leather tannery in Newark more than 300 years ago. 

"This type of technology presents as much hope for a cleaner, more humane planet as any technology that exists today," said Josh Balk, vice president of farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States, an animal rights group in Washington, D.C.

Forgacs, 42, of Brooklyn, laid out his vision in North Brunswick last week at a meet-up sponsored by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

He founded San Diego-based Organovo in 2009, making three-dimensional human tissue that helps researchers test their drugs. And he began to wonder: if he could create human tissue from cells, what else could he do?

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Forgacs said he began hearing from the leather industry. The reliable material had been used for thousands of years, but it was under pressure.

The world population is growing fast and keeping up enough livestock to feed and clothe it isn't sustainable; livestock account for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and they use a huge amount of water, antibiotics and land, a 2010 United Nations report said.

Forgacs' company went public in 2013, and he left, turning his attention to making a material that is biologically similar to leather — without killing livestock.

"What if, instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal, we started with what the tissues are made of, the basic unit of life: the cell," Forgacs said at a TED talk in 2013.

In the early days, the company took cells from an animal with a biopsy and grew them in a culture. It could be in any shape it liked a wallet, a handbag, a shoe. And the production would eliminate the gruesome slaughterhouse; it would look more like a brewery, he said at the talk.

Today, the company produces collagen from engineered yeast cells, and then assembles the collagen into a network of fibers, which can be tanned and finished. It is produced without animals altogether.

Forgacs' idea could pay off for New Jersey.

Modern Meadows, in search of a headquarters, settled on Brooklyn to take advantage of a rare talent base that included scientists, engineers and designers.

But it quickly outgrew its space and turned to New Jersey, which had seen its big pharmaceutical companies downsize, leaving plenty of laboratory space vacant.

The state EDA approved tax credits of up to $32 million. And Modern Meadow a year ago set up shop at ON3, the 116-acre corporate campus abandoned by Roche in 2012.

For New Jersey, it is a full-circle moment. In the early 1800s, Newark had a leather-based economy that was unmatched, featuring shoemakers, saddle makers and tanners, Star-Ledger columnist Charles F. Cummings noted in a 1997 column.

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Tanneries have long since gone overseas, particularly to China, the U.N. report said.

But Modern Meadow could be a disruptive force, bringing an old industry back to the state in a new fashion, observers said.

"It's farming indoors," said Paul Woitach, managing partner of Pharmaceutical Advisors, a consulting firm based in Montgomery Township in Somerset County. "This is biology and using biology as opposed to pure chemistry. There is so much potential to make things this way that you can’t just make with chemistry."

In fact, why stop with leather?

Companies are starting to make inroads using cell culture technology to develop hamburger, chicken and fish.

To Forgacs, the road to bring food to the mass market is more complicated than leather. It would have to win over consumers so enamored with the taste of meat that they celebrated National Cheeseburger Day this month.

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But it isn't science fiction anymore. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Food Safety and Inspection Service are scheduled to host a public meeting in Washington, D.C., in October to talk about potential hazards and regulatory oversight.

"The companies tell you its more sustainable, but that hasn’t been tested because they don’t have any commercial production facilities," Rhonda Miller, an animal science professor at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, said of the bio-food companies.

"They're trying to understand those things. What you do in a tiny petri dish to upscale that to actual production, those are big steps to take. They're in the process of taking them. I’m interested in what they come up with."

Forgacs' plan: to turn bio-engineered leather into its own brand, called Zoa.

Not that it has always gone smoothly. In the early days, he said, It was taking so long to grow enough cells to make leather that he wondered how he could manufacture enough to fill orders.

So he hired an executive from DuPont, who helped devise a way to make the building block of leather, collagen, more efficiently.

And he admits the company still is in the development stage. Ultimately, he said, it will need to design a product that resonates with consumers.

But the market seems to be there for the taking.

"There’s so many pain points," he told a visitor after his talk in North Brunswick. "If you’re a large buyer of leather there are so many pain points. The availability of high- quality leather goes down and down and down every year. The more animals that are grown for their meat, the worse the quality of leather.

"It's a very inefficient supply chain. There's a lot of waste. It's better for the planet, and better for the consumer. That’s why we created this brand, a brand of bio-leather material. So consumers in a few years time can say I’d like this shoe, do you have it in Zoa?"

Michael L. Diamond; @mdiamondapp; 732-643-4038; mdiamond@gannettnj.com