Mosa Meats gets new investors

Mosa Meats, which multiplies livestock cells to make meat, has received another $116 million in funding from Merck, the German drug maker, and Bell Food Group of Switzerland.

Mosa Meats was founded by Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands after he made the world’s first hamburger grown in the laboratory from a beef animal’s cells ion 2013. It cost $406,000.

Sergey Brin, one of the two founders of Google, was an early investor in Mosa Meats.

There are concerns among cattle ranchers and beef feedlot owners that these “meats” will be strong competitors. They are lobbying the United States government to require them to carry labels identifying them as distinct from farm-raised beef, pork and chicken.