Using macromolecular crowding to increase cellular meat production and feed a low-emission bioeconomy

3D Bio-Tissues Ltd（3DBT）是一家纽卡斯尔大学的衍生公司，正在将细胞生物学和组织工程的最新发展转化为医疗和食品相关产品。该公司已经开发出一种生产高度组织化的胶原组织的方法。这些工程化组织与其天然对应物之间的结构相似性是显著的，并且允许所得组织的功能显著改善。例如，3DBT目前正在为皮肤和角膜替代品创造有组织的胶原组织，但最近表明这一过程也与细胞肉有关。一个挑战仍然是降低生产这些组织的成本，特别是如果打算作为食品替代品（细胞肉必须是大众消费者负担得起的），同时消除在该过程中使用动物源性成分。因此，该项目探索开发简单，廉价，易于获得的培养基补充剂，以培养细胞，并使组织的生产重现肉的质地和组成，同时满足主要市场需求，即低价格和无血清。欧洲，美国和其他地方的几个研究小组和公司正在开发无血清培养基替代品，以提高细胞肉的生产。然而，这些策略大多集中在寻找相关血清因子的天然和合成替代品。我们建议采取一种不同的方法，重点是使用来自现有农工副产品的新型补充剂。在培养基中使用这些将代表一种新的无动物/外源性物质的方法，以提高细胞肉生产的效率，这一策略旨在减少（甚至消除）对血清补充剂的需求-使产品真正无动物。最终，与我们的组织生产方法结合使用的可行性研究结果将提供一种新的体外系统，以生产高度组织化，多层次的牛肉，绵羊肉和猪肉等同物，具有消费者熟悉和喜爱的质地和味道。因此，我们希望这些创新能够直接解决细胞肉类市场的一些主要“痛苦”，即以较低的生产价格提供具有类似特征的天然产品，并且无需屠宰动物也无需使用抗生素。最终，我们预计普通消费者更多地采用细胞肉将消除对集约化动物养殖的需求，从而有助于降低全球温室气体排放。

3D Bio-Tissues Ltd (3DBT) is a Newcastle University spin-out company that is translating recent developments in cell biology and tissue engineering into medical and food-related products. The company has developed a process that produces highly organised collagenous tissue. The similarity in structure between these engineered tissues and their natural counterparts is remarkable and allows for significantly improved function of the resulting tissue. For example 3DBT is currently creating organised collagenous tissues for skin and corneal replacements, but has recently shown that this process is also relevant to cellular meat. A challenge remains in driving down the costs of producing these tissues, especially if intended as food alternatives (cellular meat will necessarily have to be affordable for mass consumers), while eliminating at the same time the use of animal-derived ingredients from the process. Thus, this project explores the development of simple, inexpensive, and readily-available media supplements to feed cells in culture and enable the production of tissues recreating the texture and composition of meat whilst meeting central market demands i.e. low price and absence of serum.Several research groups and companies in Europe, the US, and elsewhere are developing serum-free media alternatives for enhanced production of cellular meat. However, most of these strategies focus on finding natural and synthetic substitutes for the relevant serum factors. We propose to take a different approach that focuses on the use of novel supplements derived from existing agro-industrial by-products. Use of these in the culture medium will represent a new animal/xenobiotic-free method to increase the efficiency of cellular meat production, a strategy that aims to reduce (or even eliminate) the need for serum supplementation - making the product truly animal-free. Ultimately, the results from this feasibility study used in conjunction with our tissue production methods will deliver a new _in vitro_ system to produce highly-organised, multi-stratified equivalents to bovine, ovine, and porcine meat with a texture and taste that consumers know and love. We therefore expect these innovations to directly address some of the main 'pains' of the cellular meat market, namely by providing natural-looking products with similar characteristics, at a lower production price, and grown without the need of animal slaughter nor use of antibiotics. Ultimately, we expect that a greater adoption of cellular meat by general consumers will eliminate the need for intensive animal farming, thus contributing to lower greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.