Enabling Technology - Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Energy Demands in the Meat Production Industry via Scaling Advanced 3D Culture Bioreactors

Food production, and in particular animal-derived meat products, are a major source of green-house gases, compounded by the remarkable inefficiency in biomass conversion (grain to dense muscle tissue in meat), along with growing challenges with food safety, quality and nutrition. To address this growing problem, we propose to exploit the emerging field of cellular agriculture (tissue engineering of muscle and fat for food) as a route to significantly reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHG) and energy use and to address the associated challenges listed above and associated with current livestock production methods for meat output. To accomplish this outcome, a key challenge in the field is to enable scaled production to demonstrate feasibility of the cellular agriculture process. This scaling process is the major focus of this proposal, to implement two novel bioreactor designs to assess scaling and outcomes (e.g., biomass per unit volume, cost of production, GHG/energy usage) for in vitro meat production (schematic). This study will accomplish two major outcomes with new enabling technology: (a) demonstration of feasibility for scaling in vitro meat production – from the bench-scale to the macro-scale, and (b) provide data upon which suitable mass and energy balances can be derived to address accurate predictions of energy, GHC and related savings. In addition, we propose options to further refine the systems to improve biomass yields, including scaffold, cell and related engineered systems; which will be initiated here and optimized in future work.