CAREER: 3D Printing High Lipid Content Cultivated Meat to Minimize Livestock Environmental Impacts

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

The current agricultural supply chain will be unable to sustainably meet the world’s increasing demand for animal proteins. Currently, the majority of livestock are reared in concentrated animal feeding operations causing environmental, public health, and food security concerns. An emerging option is to replace conventionally produced meat with meat-like tissues grown in the lab (i.e., cultured meat). Cultured meat can help to reduce the environmental, public health, and food security issues posed by commercial farming. However, major scientific, technological, and educational barriers related to consumer acceptance must be overcome. Developing cultured meat products (i.e., ground meat and/or steaks) that have the texture, flavor, and familiarity of conventional meat products will be critical to consumer acceptance. Current cultured meat technologies are expensive and have focused on ground meat products that do not re-create the three-dimensional (3D) tissue structures of animal steaks, especially with regards to the distribution of fat in these tissues. Therefore, the goal of this CAREER project is to establish a fundamental understanding of the biological dynamics of fat accumulation in muscle and develop 3D bioprinting techniques and parameters to create cultured meat products that match the properties and structures of conventional meats. 3D bioprinting would add minimal production costs while significantly increasing the price point of the final cultured product, improving the financial viability of the industry. In parallel, this proposal seeks to engage in educational and public outreach activities to increase consumer awareness of the current animal protein supply chain’s critical weaknesses and the biomedical engineering solutions to relieve these, drive consumer acceptance, and grow the cellular agriculture research community. The investigator’s long-term research goals involve 3D printing of biological tissues, mechanistic studies of disease processes, and regenerative medicine. Towards this goal, this CAREER project seeks to enhance consumer acceptance and palatability of cultured meats by accurately reproducing the texture, properties, and costs associated with conventional meat products. The Research Plan is organized under two objectives: (1) Obtain a fundamental understanding of intramuscular fat accumulation and (2) Print viable, lipid-laden adipocytes alone and into the intramuscular space. These objectives will provide an open-source foundation for the cultured meat industry and future work in human disease modelling, regenerative medicine, and reconstructive medicine. The proposed studies will (1) develop conditions for co-culturing mature adipocytes and skeletal muscle cells that have not been achieved or reported, (2) make significant contributions to creating new models of biological mechanisms for intramuscular fat accumulation, and (3) establish parameters for the 3D bioprinting of tissues that contain both lipid-laden adipocytes and skeletal muscle cells. These 3D printed tissues should be mechanically and compositionally similar to their biological counterparts and will significantly improve the fundamental research and application-driven capabilities of technical personnel in cellular agriculture and biomedical engineering. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.