Challenges and possibilities for bio-manufacturing cultured meat

Background: Cultured meat has emerged as a breakthrough technology for the global food industry, which was considered as a potential solution to mitigate serious environmental, sustainability, global public health, and animal welfare concerns in the near future. Although there is promise that cultured meat can supplement or even replace conventional meat, many challenges still need to be resolved in the early stages. Scope and approach: In this review, we focused on the characteristics of cultured meat and summarized the current technological challenges and their possible solutions based on tissue and bioreactor engineering, food science, and material science for preparing stem cells, optimizing culture conditions, and developing cost-effective culture media, bioreactor designs, and food processing systems. Key findings and conclusions: With rapid progress in tissue and bioreactor engineering, new technologies for culturing meat have been developed and significant progress has been made in recent years. However, as research on cultured meat is intrinsically complex, it is necessary to encourage the integration of multidisciplinary research in this field in the future. We propose some innovative approaches, such as the applications of synthetic biology and bioreactor engineering. These strategies will be helpful to scale-up cultured meat in future applications.