- Project Lead: Professor Cathy Ye
- Total budget: £1.4 million
- Funder: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
- Duration: April 2024 – April 2026
- Team members: professor Wei Huang, professor Zhanfeng Cui, professor Aidong Yang, Sizhe Qiu, Jhanvi Sharma, Eliska Kratochvilova
In 2022, 82 billion land animals were slaughtered to produce 361 million tons of meat, and these numbers increase every year. Cultured meat (CM), also known as cell-cultured or lab-grown meat, has been touted as a potential solution to various sustainability challenges associated with traditional animal farming. CM is produced by isolating animal cells and placing them in a culture medium to proliferate in a bioreactor. Once matured, the CM is harvested, processed, and used to create various meat-based products. Currently, CM products are not widely available, mainly due to prohibitively high production costs and thus high retail prices.
The project aims to develop a non-dividing cell-based biocatalyst that converts metabolic waste from animal cell culture to desirable components in cell culture media. The biocatalyst will be integrated into the CM bioreactors designed to enable selective removal of the engineered cells throughout the process.
The project has assembled a team of experts in the fields of biomaterials, synthetic biology, mathematical modelling and bioprocessing, with the support of a leading company in CM in the UK. Our goal is to lower the environmental burden of globally increasing demand for meat products by enhancing the CM production sustainability.
