Automated production of clean meat

The world population is growing, and inherently the amount of consumed food is increasing. The consumption of meat is expected to increase by 73% by 2050, while it will be impossible to increase the meat production to this extend. Next to the fact that livestock production is extremely inefficient, it is also estimated that livestock farming covers 15% of the total greenhouse gas emission. Since those problems are insurmountable with the current ways of producing meat, and a large global increase of the vegetarian population is unlikely, researchers are investigating several alternatives. One of those is clean meat: an in vitro way of meat production, using stem cells for cell culture and tissue engineering techniques. Clean meat has the potential to greatly reduce animal suffering, even while satisfying the nutritional and sensational requirements of meat consumers. Others reasons to promote clean meat are the reduction of food borne illnesses and land use, which means that soil will be free for alternative land use. Moreover, culturing meat in a lab will result in chemically safe and disease free meat that can be designed to the populations preferences, as the conditions of the in vitro meat production are controllable and manipulable, which also means that clean meat is more reliable than in vitro meat. Research on clean meat has shown promising possibilities over the previous years as to how it can enrich everybody's lives. The goal of establishing a manner in which the meat can be produced on a large scale is within reach. However, the current fabrication process of clean meat is very laborious, especially when it has to be manufactured on an industrialized scale.

To fabricate clean meat in an easier, faster, and cheaper way, a system needs to be developed that takes over all the tasks of the fabrication process. The idea is to make use of hollow fiber membranes and to seed them with cells (bovine myoblasts and fat cells). The hollow fiber membranes will be able to provide the cells with nutrients and to remove the metabolites. Moreover, they will function as a surface for the cells as anchor points to attach on. By orienting the hollow fiber membranes in a three-dimensional structure, a three-dimensional piece of tissue can be made. The system will be integrated in an incubator to control the conditions of the environment. A sensor will be used to determine the quality of the nutritional medium, resulting in a feedback loop that leads to an increase or decrease of the flow rate. The idea that is going to solve the problem is based on literature, that shows experiments with other types of cells. Since there is no research done on the exact ratio of specific cells that are needed for clean meat yet in this three-dimensional structure, experiments have to be conducted for a proof of principle. This could be done by me, during my masters thesis (in 2019), in combination with testing the prototype of the solution. After that, it will be ready for implementation on an industrialized scale.