A new scientific review, Advances and Challenges in Cell Biology for Cultured Meat, by the Cell Biology team at Dutch biotech company Mosa Meat, highlights the importance of a detailed understanding and accurate manipulation of cell biology in designing cultivated meat bioprocesses.
Despite significant interest and breakthroughs in the field, the paper argues that numerous challenges remain at all stages of biomanufacturing, including the cell biology process.
To shed light on the advancements in this area, the review focuses explicitly on identifying suitable starting cell types, tuning proliferation and differentiation conditions, and optimizing cell-biomaterial interactions for creating nutritious and enticing cultivated meat products.
Additionally, the paper explores the emerging field of cultivated meat and its potential to revolutionize meat production if coordinated scientific efforts solve the biomanufacturing bottleneck. It also highlights that nonscientific challenges such as regulatory approval, consumer acceptance, and market feasibility must be addressed to successfully implement this technology that is better for animals, the environment, and people.
Cultivating beef at scale
Mosa Meat recently became the ‘first’ cultivated meat company to receive B Corp certification. The company is scaling beef production to make “tens of thousands of cultivated hamburgers” at its new scale-up facility in Maastricht. The company has announced plans to apply for regulatory approvals in Singapore and the USA.
Mosa Meat is a privately held company backed by Blue Horizon, Bell Food Group, Nutreco, Mitsubishi Corporation, and Leonardo DiCaprio. To date, the company has raised around $100 million to scale its cultivated meat operations.
“The cultured/cultivated meat scientific literature is fairly light on primary research articles compared to the number of reviews (many of which are excellent), so we generally try to steer away from writing more of them, but the opportunity to note some of our thoughts specifically on cell biological topics for an Annual Reviews publication was too tempting!” Joshua Flack, Head of Cell Biology at Mosa Meat, shared on social media.
The review has been published online by Annual Reviews, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to the progress of science.
