Newtrition: The Future of Food

A Group Project By Elysia Chang, Deepti Srinivasan, Sophie Waterhouse & Rachel Finkel

The future of food presents a myriad of possibilities, from in-vitro foods to 3D printed meals. The field of cellular agriculture has skyrocketed in the 21st century, attempting to provide a more sustainable and ethical alternative to large-scale meat production. In 2013, Mark Post, a professor at Maastricht University, created a lab-grown meat burger with only muscle cells and no fat. Since then, the concept of lab-grown meat has been expanded to encompass a wider scope of foods, from lab-grown dairy to lab-grown seafood. Additionally, some companies Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have developed vegan products that incorporate plant heme to mimic the taste of meat. Most recently, an Israeli researcher created the first piece of unprocessed cultured meat. While all of these are viable options of the advancements made in the field thus far, none have successfully bioprinted saturated fat free steak using cultured bovine cells.

Unlike its predecessors, our cultured steak will be structurally consistent with that of agricultural meat. Additionally, it will be free of saturated fats. To scalably engineer steak, we first plan to immortalize cell lines of mesenchymal progenitor cells that differentiate into myogenic, adipogenic and fibrogenic progenitor cells. We plan to 3-D print steak by synthesizing a mixture of each cell type and a fast-gelling bioink that mimics the cell’s extracellular matrix. A microfluidic print head will allow for rapid switching of bioink mixture, causing each cell type to remain in position until contacted by an appropriate cross-linking cell. To deposit myocytes, we primitively plan to dispel a mixture of myogenic progenitor cells and collagen or silk fibroin containing ink from the print head. To deposit adipocytes and create a network of perimysium and epimysium, we plan to dispel a mixture of adipogenic/fibrogenic progenitor cells and an ink containing factors that encourage adipocyte formation and metalloproteinases that deter excessive fibrogenesis along with  materials for the adipocytes to synthesize unsaturated fats. We plan to investigate both genetic engineering approaches to reprogram adipocytes to store unsaturated instead of saturated fats. Tentatively, the plan is to hijack the gene cluster system that produces omega-3 fatty acids in bacteria and inject it into the adipogenic progenitor cells along with transcription factors. We will need to collaborate with optimization engineers to encode the structure of the steak into the 3-D bioprinter to guide bioink dispension. Because much of our technology was invented for tissue regeneration in humans, our technology relies on the assumption that the factors facilitating cell growth in humans function similarly in cows. We will validate methods by stitching together known information about each cell type as well as by cross-referencing the methods of previously engineered primitive muscles. 

Cardiovascular diseases are the number one of death globally, and as of 2016, 28.2 million Americans were diagnosed with heart disease. Newtrition could decrease the risk of cardiovascular diseases without sacrificing the taste of meat or necessitating a restrictive diet. This is an animal cruelty free process, as the cells that are used for the bioink can be grown and cultured in the lab. The primary cells needed can be extracted from cows without killing them, and they can be grown using an animal free serum as a replacement to fetal bovine serum. The lack of a need for cows also adds an environmental benefit as cows are a significant factor in greenhouse gas emissions. However, an ethical concern may be the fact that our product may be socioeconomically divisive as it will most likely be expensive.

A major advantage of our technology is that it would produce meat without saturated fat, which we would accomplish by engineering adipose cells. This would be extremely beneficial for those suffering from or at risk of cardiovascular diseases. Our technology will produce meat that has maintained its structural integrity and resembles real meat, rather than past technologies that have created lab-grown or 3D-printed meat that more resembles a burger and doesn’t include an integrated network of muscle fibers and connective tissues. In this way, our technology would improve upon past technologies. A con of our technology is that it would be very expensive to produce, and it would likely not be affordable for lower-income individuals.