Scaffolding Biomaterials for 3D Cultivated Meat: Prospects and Challenges

Abstract

Cultivating meat from stem cells rather than by raising animals is a promising solution to concerns about the negative externalities of meat production. For cultivated meat to fully mimic conventional meat's organoleptic and nutritional properties, innovations in scaffolding technology are required. Many scaffolding technologies are already developed for use in biomedical tissue engineering. However, cultivated meat production comes with a unique set of constraints related to the scale and cost of production as well as the necessary attributes of the final product, such as texture and food safety. This review discusses the properties of vertebrate skeletal muscle that will need to be replicated in a successful product and the current state of scaffolding innovation within the cultivated meat industry, highlighting promising scaffold materials and techniques that can be applied to cultivated meat development. Recommendations are provided for future research into scaffolds capable of supporting the growth of high-quality meat while minimizing production costs. Although the development of appropriate scaffolds for cultivated meat is challenging, it is also tractable and provides novel opportunities to customize meat properties.

Bioengineering Outlook on Cultivated Meat Production

“…The bioprocess of CM production can generally be divided into four phases [ 71 ]. The first phase (I) involves cell isolation and initial proliferation; the second phase (II) represents cell expansion on a large scale (i.e., in expansion bioreactors); the third phase (III) is cell differentiation or tissue formation in other types of bioreactors; and finally, the fourth phase (IV) involves processing into a final food product [ 71 ].…”

“…Micro-scale cultures of microcarriers (MCs) made of synthetic or natural polymers have been developed for efficient proliferation of anchor-dependent cell sources necessary for the CM production bioprocess on a larger scale. Therefore, considering their high surface-to-volume ratio, MCs play a major role in the second phase of the CM production bioprocess because they allow an increase in the total biomass of undifferentiated cells [ 71 , 72 , 73 ].…”

“…A variety of commercially available MCs are designed for cells used in the biomedical field, such as iPSCs [ 74 ], ESCs [ 75 , 76 ] and human MSCs (hMSCs) [ 77 , 78 ], and a significantly smaller number of MCs are designed for use in CM production [ 71 ]. As described in detail in Section 2.1 and Section 2.2 , notable cell types for CM production are muscle SCs/skeletal myoblasts [ 37 ], MSCs, FAPs, ESCs and iPSCs, obtained from relevant species such as cattle [ 54 ], chickens, pigs, sheep [ 36 ] and rabbits [ 54 ].…”

“…These types of polymers and materials derived from them are easily obtained and can be biocompatible [ 85 ] as well as biodegradable [ 73 , 86 , 87 ]. Although few in number, there are companies that make edible MCs for use in CM bioprocess, such as Matrix Meats [ 88 ] and Tantti Laboratory [ 71 ].…”

“…Although still on a smaller scale, a number of alternatives to MC cultures based on organoids [ 89 ], spheroids [ 90 , 91 , 92 ] or single-cell suspension culture [ 93 ] are being considered [ 71 ].…”