Food via Tissue Engineering – Challenges and Opportunities

The need for future foods for the ever-growing population requires consideration of alternative approaches toward food sustainability, nutrition and security. To address this need, we pursue a cell-based, tissue engineering approach, eliminating animals from the process. Our central hypothesis is that sustainable, cost-effective, and scalable cultivated-meat and alternative proteins will provide new food availability options and healthier food alternatives, while decreasing environmental impact. Towards this goal there is much progress, with cell and tissue biomanufacturing central to the approaches. Further, there remain many challenges and opportunities ahead, from cells, media, safety and scale up, to tuning nutrition, composition and overall food quality and health. These topics will be discussed in the context of this emerging food frontier, where the impact is potentially transformative.