Cultivated
Bioreactor scale-up engineering solutions for cultivated meat
To scale cultivated meat towards market readiness, standard 2D cultures or stirred flasks are not a viable option for large-scale growth and must be replaced by bioreactors capable of supporting high-density and large-volume cell cultures.
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Cultivated
- Bioprocess design
Resources
- Deep dive: Cultivated meat bioprocess design
- GFI report: Trends in cultivated meat scale-up and bioprocessing (2024) & webinar (March 2024)
- Large-scale cultured meat production: Trends, challenges and promising biomanufacturing technologies (2022)
- Scale-up economics for cultured meat (2021)
- A conceptual air-lift reactor design for large-scale animal cell cultivation in the context of in vitro meat production (2020)
Current challenges
To scale cultivated meat towards market readiness, standard 2D cultures or stirred flasks are not a viable option for large-scale growth and must be replaced by bioreactors capable of supporting high-density and large-volume cell cultures. There are many different bioreactor designs to choose from that can be separated based on how the medium is mixed and whether the cells are grown in suspension or adhered to a solid surface. For animal cell culture, the most commonly used bioreactor is a continuous stirred tank reactor that enables the growth of cells in suspension via mechanical stirring while maintaining high mass transfer of oxygen. In biopharma, stirred tank bioreactor vessels have been used for animal cell production in volumes up to 20,000 litres. However, these volumes may not be sufficient for cultivated meat, which must achieve production volumes more akin to the food and feed industries rather than biopharmaceuticals.
Proposed solutions
- Innovations in cultivated meat bioprocessing can be broadly classified into strategies focused on food-grade operation, process intensification, and the exploration of novel bioreactor geometries, all of which have the potential to substantially reduce the cost of cultivated meat production.
- Strategies for adaptation of anchorage-dependent cell types to suspension growth need to be explored for scale-up applicability and cultures in bioreactors.