OPPORTUNITIES TO LEVERAGE CELL CULTURE TECHNOLOGY TO CREATE SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS: THE DEVELOPMENT OF 'CLEAN MEAT'

摘要

Clean meat - meat produced through cell culture, rather than animal slaughter - can dramatically reduce the environmental footprint of meat while alleviating the severe public health threats and animal welfare concerns posed by factory farming. Recent developments in regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and large-scale cell culture for cellular therapies have spawned a multitude of technologies that are immediately applicable to clean meat production. Many of these biomedical technologies and tools can already address areas of need within clean meat research and development, but large-scale cell culture for clean meat production presents a number of unique requirements that are not currently met with existing technologies developed for the biomedical, biopharma, and R&D industries. Most notably, cost constraints and scale requirements for the clean meat industry are significantly different than for cellular therapeutics or regenerative medicine, and innovation is needed to develop products that are optimized for the cell types and structures that are relevant for clean meat. Developing these tools for clean meat will simultaneously advance the technology and reduce costs for the biomedical and therapeutic applications. More sophisticated approaches, such as utilizing genome editing and synthetic biology to enhance cell line performance, represent untapped potential with regards to application towards clean meat. This talk will identify several opportunities to apply synthetic biology advances to active areas of clean meat research. These include: engineering co-culture differentiation pathways for complex tissue formation in response to inexpensive triggers, reprogramming cellular signaling pathways to decrease reliance on exogenous growth factors, and developing optogenetic tools to spatiotemporally control cellular differentiation for marbling and structuring within meat tissues. Within the context of these new applications for cell culture and tissue engineering technologies within the clean meat industry, we will discuss potential for synergistic product development through partnerships between biomedical and life science researchers and the emergent clean meat industry. As the demand for meat increases, severe resource constraints, climate considerations, and global food security concerns are motivating the search for new alternatives to our inherently inefficient current system of feeding animals in order to feed ourselves. Clean meat presents the only feasible alternative for producing real meat to satisfy this demand, and cell culture engineering tools show tremendous promise for hastening the development and commercialization of this sustainable alternative.