Abstract
Cultured meat (also referred to as cultivated meat or cell-based meat)—CM—is fabricated through the process of cellular agriculture (CA), which entails application of bioengineering, i.e., tissue engineering (TE) principles to the production of food. The main TE principles include usage of cells, grown in a controlled environment provided by bioreactors and cultivation media supplemented with growth factors and other needed nutrients and signaling molecules, and seeded onto the immobilization elements—microcarriers and scaffolds that provide the adhesion surfaces necessary for anchor-dependent cells and offer 3D organization for multiple cell types. Theoretically, many solutions from regenerative medicine and biomedical engineering can be applied in CM-TE, i.e., CA. However, in practice, there are a number of specificities regarding fabrication of a CM product that needs to fulfill not only the majority of functional criteria of muscle and fat TE, but also has to possess the sensory and nutritional qualities of a traditional food component, i.e., the meat it aims to replace. This is the reason that bioengineering aimed at CM production needs to be regarded as a specific scientific discipline of a multidisciplinary nature, integrating principles from biomedical engineering as well as from food manufacturing, design and development, i.e., food engineering. An important requirement is also the need to use as little as possible of animal-derived components in the whole CM bioprocess. In this review, we aim to present the current knowledge on different bioengineering aspects, pertinent to different current scientific disciplines but all relevant for CM engineering, relevant for muscle TE, including different cell sources, bioreactor types, media requirements, bioprocess monitoring and kinetics and their modifications for use in CA, all in view of their potential for efficient CM bioprocess scale-up. We believe such a review will offer a good overview of different bioengineering strategies for CM production and will be useful to a range of interested stakeholders, from students just entering the CA field to experienced researchers looking for the latest innovations in the field.
Highlights
This article is an open access articleBy 2100, global food systems will need to meet the dietary demands of more than 10 billion [1,2] people who on average will be wealthier than people today and will aspire to the type of food choices currently available only in high-income countries [3]
In order to put topics of this review in the context of the current state of the world in the year 2022 and emphasize the need for advances in all the aspects, including the bioengineering-focused ones, that are related to bringing cell-based meat (CM) closer to real-life use, we remind the readers that the global outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 zoonotic virus that has been on-going since early 2020 has increased general attention given to zoonotic viral infections [7]
The advantages of fluidized-bed reactor (FBR) that qualify them as possible candidates for CM production include homogenous bed expansion behavior, related to good mass transfer characteristics, as well as lower shear stress compared to stirred-tank reactor (STR) and simpler scale-up procedures [174]
Summary
By 2100, global food systems will need to meet the dietary demands of more than 10 billion [1,2] people who on average will be wealthier than people today and will aspire to the type of food choices currently available only in high-income countries [3] This food will have to be produced in a sustainable way, contributing to a reduction in climate change effects and addressing other environmental challenges. Aster that in September 2021 received regulatory approval in Singapore to produce CM for commercial sale This short recapitulation of the current CM industry environment indicates several important points: (1) a large portion of CM research is being conducted in privately funded companies, making any discovery a proprietary intellectual property, not available for re-use and improvement in the general scientific community. Achieving CM with the same characteristics as “native meat” would mean proliferating and differentiating stem/progenitor cells to mature tissues that constitute meat, by keeping their biological variety and nutritional values
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