Cultivated
Biomaterials for scaffolding in cultivated meat
For cultivated meat to fully replicate the organoleptic and nutritional characteristics of conventional meat, advancements in scaffolding technology are essential.
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Cultivated
- Scaffolding
Resources
- Plant-based scaffolds to improve cultivated meat nutrition
- Deep dive: Cultivated meat scaffolding
- Scaffolding biomaterials for 3D cultivated meat: Prospects and challenges (2022)
- 3D microenvironments for cell expansion
Current challenges
For cultivated meat to fully replicate the organoleptic and nutritional characteristics of conventional meat, advancements in scaffolding technology are essential. Numerous scaffolding technologies have been designed and developed primarily for applications in biomedical tissue engineering. However, biomaterials for edible scaffolding come with their own set of challenges, requiring extensive research into food-compatible hydrogels, 3D printing bioinks, edible/biodegradable microcarriers, and lastly, scaffolding-integrated novel bioreactor designs. Therefore, scaffolding for the production of cultivated meat presents distinctive challenges concerning scale, production costs, and specific product attributes like texture and food safety.
Proposed solutions
- Naturally-derived materials from plants and fungi have been explored for cultivated meat. For instance, decellularized plant scaffolds, with their strong anisotropy and the presence of optimally sized pores, have been shown to be optimal for promoting myoblast alignment. Another promising approach could be hybrid materials, primarily composed of edible, plant-derived components (as scaffolds or microcarriers) but ‘spiked’ with bioactive components such as adhesion proteins and peptides.
- Incorporating fat and muscle cells into whole muscle cuts like steaks will be vital for cultivated meat’s flavour, texture, and consumer appeal. Co-culture myocytes and adipocytes onto a structured scaffold poses unique challenges due to differences in culture conditions and physical properties (i.e., varying topographic cues like stiffness or adhesive properties) needed for muscle and fat cell differentiation. Some of the most promising solutions for integrating fat into structured cuts of cultivated meat are edible microcarriers, hydrogels, and 3D bioprinting methods requiring more exploratory research.
- Cultivated meat research focuses primarily on muscle fibres and fat cells. However, other cell types serve functions that are often underappreciated in their relevance to cultivated meat. Co-culture methods with various support cells (fibroblasts, myofibroblasts, or smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells, hepatocytes or immune cells) on scaffolds and/or microcarriers could solve a variety of challenges for cultivated meat scale-up and need to be explored further.
- Fish uniquely differ from terrestrial meat in structure, and scaffolds designed for terrestrial meat might not recapitulate the sensory attributes of conventional fish. Research aimed specifically at developing and testing scaffolds for fish cell lines would help accurately reproduce 3D fish tissue. For instance, the “chevron” pattern of fish muscle arises during development as a result of differentials in friction along the axis of each myotome. It might be possible to recapitulate this process in cultivated fish during differentiation and maturation by starting from a scaffold made of flat layers, combined with non-homogenous cues, including stiffness, surface patterning, and/or molecular cues, within the scaffold structure.