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The cellular agriculture field requires that multiple industries, regulatory bodies, and disciplines work together in order to bring this new emerging technology to market. This article reviews a few of the top challenges cultured meat producers face including high raw material costs, cell line development, and manufacturing to scale. While progress has been made over the last decade, solving these challenges today may kickoff a new era for the way we produce and consume meat in the future.
Production costs for cultured meat are still much higher than farming, despite good progress being made over the past decade. One of the biggest challenges is the high cost that comes from the vast amounts of cell culture media used in the production process, with animal sera and growth factors being the most expensive components. Animal sera, such as fetal bovine serum (FBS), can provide essential nutrients for cells, however, animal sera by nature is also highly variable, impacted by national and global supply chain volatility. Developing a proprietary serum-free media can also be extremely expensive to formulate at low-scale, however, working with a contract manufacturer can help offset costs with prototyping via reagent purchasing power and outside industry know-how as the producer begins large-scale manufacturing.
The cellular agriculture industry relies on the same equipment and techniques used in cell biology, cell therapies, bioprocessing, and viral vaccine manufacturing. However, growing cultured meat is very different than making millions of cells for therapeutic research. For one thing, while the final product is a food commodity with a much lower selling price at a much larger volume, some companies adopt the same approach used to make expensive medications: pharmaceutical-grade raw materials, complex bioreactors, and cGMP facilities to hold and produce in them.
The industry is still determining how to adapt technologies from biopharma and use them for products with much lower cost. This may involve sourcing food-grade media components from lower-cost suppliers, food-approved facility, and modifying existing technologies to be cost effective for mass consumption.
Many of the ingredients used for growing cultured meat have not yet been reviewed or approved for food consumption. For cultured meat, the food product itself is grown in a lab in cell culture media. There is some initial concern and risk that some traces of the media could remain in the final product, and possibly introduce unwanted contaminants to the cultured meat.
Food-grade cell culture media, which will require a unique set of regulations that differ from cell therapies in development, may address this issue in the future being marked safe for human consumption. As the industry moves forward, working alongside The Good Food Institute, FDA, USDA, and other regulatory bodies will be critical in advancing the idea that meat can one day be grown from culturing cells to the dinner plate.
It can be costly and time-consuming to develop stem cell lines suitable for cultured meat production. It remains challenging to differentiate cell types and co-culture muscle, fat, or connective tissues. The primary cell lines used may not be standardized creating a variable process that does not translate to large-scale production processes. In addition, mass manufacturing the same nutritional value of lab-grown meat compared to farming meat is still a major challenge for cultured meat products.
Learn more about how we support researchers with cell culture products, contract manufacturing and storage services, custom reagent sourcing, as well as marketing, sales, and distribution programs for our industry partners.
This article takes a look back at the evolution of hPSC culture systems and the quest for xeno-free and feeder free cultures.
Cellular agriculture is the alternative production of cell-based animal products, or "clean meat", using advanced cell culture technology.
This webinar panel provides industry perspective on the many different techniques used and challenges faced in the production of iPSC cells. Previously recorded by RegMedNet.
