More than 100 companies worldwide are working to produce synthetic food, but only a handful of countries have rules to assess whether their nuggets, burgers and cheeses are safe to consume.

How it works: “Cellular farmers” grow meat and seafood products using cell cultures taken from animals in bioreactors.

The cultures are then processed into muscles and fat in a lab.

In what’s known as precision fermentation, scientists tweak the bacteria’s genetics to produce edible proteins and process them into products like cheeses.

The new food map: Singapore was the first country to approve cultivated chicken meat in 2020 and has since signed off on several more poultry products.

The Asian city-state — which lacks the farmland to feed its people by conventional means — wants to produce 30 percent of its own food in this way by 2030.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration approved a cell-grown chicken product last year. It could reach the market in the next six months. Last month, the FDA gave the green light to another company producing cultivated chicken.

Other countries are skeptical. Italy is considering banning cultivated meat because of safety concerns.

A new report from the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization could spur proponents. It says there’s no evidence that artificial food poses greater dangers than traditionally grown products.

Full speed ahead? Not so fast. The two U.N. organizations were cautious in their conclusions, saying that new, unforeseen hazards might still arise in the nascent industry.

“More data generation and sharing are needed to identify the similarities and differences from conventional foods and to determine their place in a healthy and sustainable diet,” Francesco Branca, director of the WHO’s Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, told reporters.

This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care.

Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive killer, but there’s good news from researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The group has identified an enzyme that the cancer needs to grow – ornithine aminotransferas – and found that treating it with a drug that blocks the enzyme curbed cancer growth in mouse and cell studies.

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Today on our Pulse Check podcast, host Katherine Ellen Foley talks with Ruth about a new survey finding that teenage girls think their social media use is out of control —a view that aligns in many ways with those of lawmakers in Congress and the states.

Nondrug interventions could save money and improve quality of life for people with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, a new study finds.

Brown University researchers used computer models based on retirement studies and billing data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to simulate how someone with a dementia diagnosis might use different forms of care, like hands-on help at home.

The researchers examined evidence-based dementia care interventions based on programs from universities like Johns Hopkins University, UCLA and New York University and calculated the lifetime costs to the health care system and society compared to costs of usual care for the same hypothetical patient.

Researchers chose those interventions because previous real-life research has shown their recipients had a reduced risk of moving to a nursing home.

When comparing costs, Eric Jutkowitz, lead study author and associate professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health, told Erin that societal costs are an important data point. That’s because they account for health care costs and out-of-pocket costs to the family of the person with dementia.

Why it matters: Alzheimer’s drugs recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration cost more than $26,000 a year and have shown only modest benefits.

“They’re still going to need care. The drugs right now don’t reverse dementia. Best-case scenario, they slow it down a little bit,” Jutkowitz said.

What’s next: While potentially cost-saving, the interventions haven’t been implemented widely outside of university settings, partly because no payment models are in place to support them.

Jutkowitz hopes the study results could be useful to state agencies and CMS, perhaps encouraging them to support cost-effective interventions that don’t neatly fit within the current payment model.

“If we’re thinking about these drugs, we should also think about how we can reimburse for nondrug dementia care interventions that can support caregivers,” he said.

Parents of babies born during the pandemic have had a lot to worry about — from the disease’s effects both before and after birth to the impact of social distancing on their children’s development.

A new analysis of research in JAMA Network Open by Sarah Mulkey, a prenatal-neonatal neurologist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, is reassuring.

The evidence suggests that infants exposed to Covid-19 in utero don’t show neurodevelopmental issues from that exposure — refuting earlier research.

But, as Mulkey notes, prior studies weren’t standardized and didn’t have a way of ruling out whether infants’ neurodevelopment was affected by Covid or being born in a pandemic.

The research: A new study, led by Morgan R. Firestein, a researcher at Columbia University, made innovative use of telehealth to reach its conclusion.

The research involved 407 infants at three separate hospital sites. Researchers tailored a standardized observation-based neurodevelopment assessment for telehealth to follow a cohort of infants from 6 months to 12 months old.

The researchers sent the infants’ parents a collection of objects for the child to interact with and then assessed the babies in real time via video call.

They found no association between prenatal exposure to Covid and neurodevelopmental problems.

A caveat: The mothers who caught Covid came down with either asymptomatic or mild cases.

What’s next: Mulkey says that, while the evidence is reassuring, it’s not definitive and longitudinal studies must be done to ensure that issues don’t turn up later.