Strategies for Enhanced Cultured Meat Products and Processes

Abstract

Meat production through cell culture has the potential to improve the environmental, nutritional, and ethical impacts of our food system. By decoupling from animal husbandry, cultured meat can maintain unprecedented control over products and processes in order to enhance their health, efficiency, safety, and sustainability. However, substantial scientific challenges remain before the potential benefits of cultured meat can be realized. Specifically, cultured meat must prove to be high quality and affordable in order to interest consumers. This will necessitate the development of delicious and nutritious cell cultured products at a scale and price that is unprecedented in the world of medical cell culture and tissue engineering. Here, we demonstrate how culture media optimization, genetic engineering and other strategies can help enable this goal by enhancing both the products (i.e., nutrition) and processes (i.e., culture systems) of cultured meat. First, genetic engineering is applied to induce the endogenous production of antioxidant phytonutrients in bovine muscle satellite cells. As lipid oxidation is one of the main mechanistic links between red meat and colorectal cancer, this effort demonstrates how cultured meat can be engineered to offer improved nutrition compared with conventional meats. Next, genetic engineering and media development strategies are applied to lower the cost of bovine satellite cell expansion. Non-genetic strategies for this include the development of a low-cost serum-free growth medium, and its subsequent cost reduction through the discovery of effective but low-cost plant derived protein extracts as replacements for expensive recombinant albumin. Genetic strategies include establishing an immortalized bovine satellite cell line, and subsequently engineering it to ameliorate media requirements for expensive recombinant fibroblast growth factor (FGF). These strategies combine to produce a system for scalable (i.e., immortalized) culture of bovine satellite cells in a serum-free medium that does not require albumin or FGF, two factors which have to-date been the largest individual cost contributors to cultured meat production. Together, these two thrusts demonstrate how genetic strategies can be applied and combined with process development strategies to increase the quality and lower the cost of cultured meat, thereby advancing progress towards cultured meat that can facilitate widespread consumer adoption.