Cultivated meat turbo-charged with immortal stem cells

The production of cultivated meat has become turbo-charged, with the possibility of cultivating immortal stem cells from bovine muscle. acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssynbio.3c00216">Published in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology, the technique makes stem cells able to reproduce hundreds of times. It was developed by the center for cellular agriculture of Tuft University in the United States.

Although almost mature by now, cellular agriculture techniques still have some limits, one of which being that during replication the cells tend to age and no longer guarantee the same characteristics of the initial cells. The American research group has now developed a technique to use in the production of meat so-called immortalized bovine muscular stem cells (iBSC), cells that can grow rapidly and divide hundreds of times, potentially endlessly, without showing signs of ageing. The iBSCs, once multiplied, are pushed to differentiate into mature muscular cells, which are the final product.

For the chair of the ethics committee of the Fondazione Umberto Veronesi, Carlo Alberto Redi, cultivated meat is an innovation that can make an important contribution to lowering costs, facilitating widescale production, and cultivating cells of other animals, such as chicken and fish.