Abstract
The need and demand for sustainable, nutritious and animal-welfare-conscious meat substitutes has spurred research into cultivated meat production. Meat mainly contains muscle and fat tissue, which can be fabricated using various tissue engineering strategies, including monoculture and co-culture approaches in different scaffolds. In this Review, we outline how co-culture approaches commonly used in biomedical tissue engineering can be applied to produce cultured meat. We discuss the relevant cell types and cell sources and examine different co-culture approaches for skeletal muscle and adipose tissue engineering. Finally, we discuss the application of such approaches for animal-free meat production, highlighting their potential to reduce cultured meat production costs, improve the organoleptic properties of cultured meat and increase tissue thickness.
Key points
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Multiple challenges still stand as barriers to the mass and low-cost production of in vitro meat with desirable nutritional and organoleptic properties.
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Insights from tissue engineering may advance cultured meat fabrication: in particular, co-culture approaches can promote tissue growth, differentiation and maturation.
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Co-culture approaches for cultivated meat production may reduce the need for growth factor supplementation, accelerate the fabrication and improve the properties of the final product, making such cultured meat more similar to animal-derived meat.
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Co-culture may also lead to undesired effects, and scaling up an efficient co-culture system remains technologically challenging.
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The authors acknowledge J. Zavin for graphical illustrations and thank Y. Posen for editorial support.
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S.D., A.T., D.S. and A.M.-S. conducted the literature survey, collated relevant information, and wrote the paper with N.L. and S.L.
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David, S., Tsukerman, A., Safina, D. et al. Co-culture approaches for cultivated meat production. Nat Rev Bioeng 1, 817–831 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-023-00077-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-023-00077-x
