Cultivated meat fabrication: A review of the latest cell biology, bioprocess technology, and tissue engineering

Background Alternative technologies for meat production offer the potential to alleviate the ethical, environmental, and public health concerns increasingly associated with conventional meat production. Production of cultivated meat using cell culture technology promises to become a viable alternative to livestock-based meat production for the food industry in the near future. Scope and approach The cutting-edge food technologies in this field are closely related to the traditional technologies used in cell biology, molecular biology, bioprocess technology, and tissue engineering. This is due to the fact that many researchers, such as cell biologists and tissue engineers, are actively investigating the development of new technologies in “cellular agriculture”. This review aims to summarize the current stage of each technical step in the sequential process of cell culture-based food production, including harvest of cell sources from livestock, quality check of purified target cells, low-cost and eco-friendly cell expansion, and tissue-engineered food production. Key findings and conclusions Traditional technologies commonly used in biomedical research now form the scientific basis for a new food production system. Alternative meat production based on cell biology, bioprocess technology, and tissue engineering has been proposed as an innovative, emerging approach to mitigate the severe consequences of livestock farming, climate change, and the growing global population. On the other hand, many challenges remain before this new type of food can be safely and confidently brought to the market for consumers, so more innovative technologies will be needed to produce cultivated meat that is acceptable as a popular food item.