Cultured meat production may have taken a giant step forward thanks to an innovative approach that has the potential to dramatically lower production costs.
A team of researchers from Tufts University (TU) may have found a way to bypass the restrictively high costs associated with cultivated meat production. The results of this promising research on a new cost-saving way to rapidly grow bovine muscle cells in labs for human consumption were published on January 26 in the inaugural issue of Cell Reports Sustainability.
Under the helm of Professor David Kaplan, the team at TU’s Center for Cellular Agriculture aimed to re-engineer bovine muscle cells so that they produce their own growth factors.
“What we did was engineer bovine muscle stem cells to produce these growth factors and turn on the signaling pathways themselves,” explained Andrew Stout, who acted as the lead researcher, reported Earth.com.
While noting that the process still needs to be optimized since slow growth was seen in the newly engineered cells, Stout remains hopeful that the team could overcome that and make it industry-ready.
This means their process has the potential to significantly reduce the costs associated with cultivated meat, as it eliminates the need for scientists to add external growth factors.
“Products have already been awarded regulatory approval for consumption in the U.S. and globally, although costs and availability remain limiting. I think advances like this will bring us much closer to seeing affordable cultivated meat in our local supermarkets within the next few years,” Kaplan said, according to Earth.com.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, lab-grown meat products have been touted as more humane and environmentally sound alternatives to traditional meat production.
Last summer, California-based companies UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat were approved by federal regulators to produce and sell cultivated chicken meat to U.S. consumers. Their product can be formed into the familiar shapes of cutlets, nuggets, or sausages before consumption. It also has fewer calories and lower fat than the average piece of conventionally sourced chicken, noteworthy benefits considering the rise in obesity rates across the country, as extensively covered in The Dallas Express.
While lab-grown meat has long been limited to small-batch production due to high production costs, the recent study might offer a new way to make it scalable to large-batch production. Were the costs of cultivated meat to drop by 90%, which the TU researchers predict, this could have a wide-ranging impact on improving food insecurity worldwide.
In the United States alone, the non-profit Feeding America estimates that over 44 million people experience food insecurity each year, 13 million of whom are children.