Opportunities to leverage cell culture technology to create sustainable food systems: The development of Clean Meat

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. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract