The Whey Forward—The Future of Food Engineering and New Uses for an Old Problem

Introduction: Everyday 2.3 billion people worldwide go hungry, while the demand for a meat inclusive diet is increasing globally. Growing more food may seem like the answer; however, climate change is effecting our ability to industrially scale animal agriculture, and livestock practices are not sustainable. With the rising harmful effects of climate change, an emerging field of technology has arisen to pursue cultivated meat, meat that is developed in vitro using non-primate skeletal or mesenchymal cells, and engineered scaffolding materials. For cultivated meat to succeed to fight global food insecurity, production rates need to be on par with traditional animal agriculture to significantly impact cost. Our solution is a novel bio-active material using an old ingredient – whey protein-based scaffolds for increasing cultivated meat production rates. Our work advances whey protein research by taking advantage of the innate properties of whey proteins, minimally reported in the literature in other applications, to attract cells, encourage growth, and mitigate the need for supplemented cell growth media. Our work addresses some burden of disposing whey amid geopolitical changes and tighter environmental regulations. In the dairy industry, it is agreed that the whey problem will not go away anytime soon, as consumer demand for cheese is on the rise globally and will need to be dealt with for the unforeseeable future; byproducts of food processing are not being used to their fullest potential, often to the detriment of the environment, adding to the growing concerns of food insecurity and inequality in the USA and globally.
Methods: Our goal was to design and build a cultivated meat scaffold containing a common carbohydrate, alginate), and a dairy by-product, whey protein. Our group has experience working with alginate hydrogels to form a variety of structures and materials with a range of mechanical properties; however, little has been uncovered about the biological effects of whey protein, particularly regarding cultivated meat. The literature suggests that whey protein supports significantly higher cell proliferation rates for engineering orthopedic tissues for biomedicine, and little is reported for any other cell type. Building off of this work, we created hydrogels with interconnected porosity and cell adhesive functionality. We determined how the composition, structure, and properties of the whey protein isolate (WPI) based scaffolds affected bovine myocyte adhesion, proliferation, and differentiation. Within the whey protein group, beta-lactoglobulin (BLG) is the most dominant, and hypothesized that BLG is the protein in whey mainly responsible for promoting cellular adhesion.

Results and Conclusions: Our research indicated that both WPI-alginate and BLG-alginate scaffolds performed better than positive controls (RGD and gelatin substrates). Future work will look at optimizing the material structure and properties for other cell types and culturing conditions. The broader impact is the relevance of the medical field and current challenges in tissue engineering that can be addressed with the unique activity of whey protein biomaterials.