Upscaling Cultivated Meat Production via Cell Engineering (UP-CELL)

Traditional meat production is associated with numerous negative externalities, including high greenhouse gas emissions, extensive land use, and obvious animal welfare concerns. Development of new, sustainable sources of protein is thus imperative. In this context ‘cultivated meat’, the production of genuine meat products from in vitro culture of animal cells, is an emerging biotechnology within the field of cellular agriculture with the potential to revolutionise food production from both an environmental and ethical perspective.
Unfortunately, higher eukaryotic cells in their unmodified state have severe limitations with respect to in vitro culture, presenting major challenges for the scalability and cost-effectiveness of cultivated meat and seafood bioprocesses. Among others, these include a preference for adherent growth, demanding medium requirements and high sensitivity to the gradients and stresses experienced in large-scale bioreactor culture. Cell line engineering approaches, including a variety of genetic modification, gene editing and laboratory evolution strategies, are being explored to overcome these obstacles. However, these are currently held back by both a critical lack of knowledge of the relevant target genes and phenotypes, as well as the tools to engineer them.
Within UP-CELL, we will overcome these obstacles by developing foundational knowledge and innovative strategies for the manipulation of key signalling and metabolic pathways in animal cell lines that allow for robust, cost-effective proliferation in upscaled culture systems. We will generate an efficient, modular toolkit that enables precise, stable engineering of animal cells. In parallel, we will combine a range of modelling and simulation approaches with wet-lab experiments to gain detailed insights into the conditions and stresses experienced by cells in large-scale bioreactors, informing our selection of target genes and pathways for modification.
We will subsequently combine these tools and knowledge to endow bovine muscle cells with critical phenotypes, including growth in suspension, resistance to stresses such as metabolite and oxygen fluctuations, and increased metabolic efficiency. We will employ Design-Build-Test-Learn cycles of cell engineering and characterisation to iteratively test and refine our engineered cell lines, as well as to further improve our models and toolkits.
Working together with a broad consortium of expert industry partners, we will then extend promising cell engineering strategies to a wide array of cell types and species, and culture these improved cell lines in large stirred-tank bioreactors to validate their performance in industrial bioprocesses. In parallel, we will assess the regulatory and safety implications of our cell engineering methods, contributing to assessment frameworks and guiding industry decisions. These advances will ultimately help bring a range of cultivated meat and seafood products closer to market, accelerating the positive impacts of these critical technologies.