Recent advances in biotechnological methods have enabled the development of cultured meat — meat grown in a laboratory using stem cell technology that mimics the texture, flavour and nutritional value of conventional meat.
Cultured meat has the potential to be less resource intensive through the lessening of animal husbandry and slaughter leading to knock on effects such as decreasing air pollution, decreasing deforestation, reducing water use/contamination, slowing biodiversity loss, shrinking antibiotic resistance and lessening foodborne illnesses.
Products for cultured meat research and development from AMSBIO fall broadly into three areas.
- First, to create the correct environment and stimuli for cultured cells.
- Second, standards and kits to test if these cells are behaving like the in vivo model.
- Finally, cryopreservation media to archive cells for reference or future use.
The company’s growing range of high-quality products for pioneering cultured meat research includes skeletal muscle differentiation kits, recombinant extracellular matrices, 3D scaffolds and cryopreservation media.
The manufacturing of cultured meat requires a suitable source of cells that can differentiate into muscle and fat cells.
A 2023 study by Kalkehi et al. discussed the implications of using primary cells that required the repeated harvest of cells from different animal sources.
This challenge was overcome with the successful cryopreservation of bovine myogenic cells in CELLBANKER media (available from AMSBIO) that maintained cell quality for downstream production of cultured meat products.
Another vital component in the development of new cell-based foods is the culture media and matrix for support of cell growth and differentiation.
In 2022, Takahashi et al. demonstrated the efficiency of iMatrix-511 Laminin E8 fragments (available from AMSBIO) for the adherence of bovine myogenic cells extracted from bovine meat and their differentiation into myotubes.
These micropatterned culture substrates were used to form a scaffold upon which myotubes could then be aligned into myofibers that mimic the structure of native muscle tissue.
Currently research is under way to decipher the optimal combination of cellular source, growth media, bioprocesses and biomaterials to successfully scale-up the processing of cultured meat products to a commercial level.
Offered as a product to consumers, all materials and procedures used in cultured meat production must follow strict regulations under GMP and FDA approval to make sure the end product is safe for consumption.
The major challenge faced in manufacturing is the high cost of this large-scale production therefore standardisation of procedures and automated processes are needed to reduce costs in the future.
AMSBIO is aiming to ease transition from bench scale to manufacturing with a range of GMP-compliant products and services to help streamline the transition.