Cellular agriculture and cultivated meat

Generation of enhanced muscle stem cell lines and fibers for cultivated meat production

Cultivated meat represents an infant but promising technology aiming to produce animal meat for human consumption. Current approaches to produce muscle fibers as a meat source through this method primarily rely on differentiation of myogenic progenitors termed myoblasts. Utilizing conventional cell culture methods, myoblasts oftentimes exhibit limited proliferation and differentiation capacities, rendering efforts to find alternative measures to expand myogenic stem cells for cellular agriculture purposes highly desirable. Given our research group’s expertise with mouse muscle cell line development, our lab further explores means to reduce costs of cultivated meat production via the generation of unique muscle stem cell lines from large animals and sea creatures, that can be used as a future source for sustainable proteins. This endeavor is supported by The Good Food Institute, a US-based non-profit foundation dedicated to accelerating alternative protein innovation, as well as an Innovation Booster Award from Innosuisse.