Engineered bionanoparticles as carriers for growth factors and peptides that promote cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation to improve the production of low-cost cultured meat

Conventional livestock farming poses serious challenges to animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and public health. As the global population grows toward 9.7 billion by 2050, demand for meat is expected to rise sharply, intensifying these issues. Current practices involve inhumane animal treatment and heavy antibiotic use, which contributes to antibiotic resistance and increases the risk of disease transmission from animals to humans. Additionally, livestock farming consumes significant natural resources and generates substantial greenhouse gas emissions. Despite these drawbacks, global meat consumption continues to increase, highlighting the urgent need for safer, more sustainable, and ethical alternatives.

Cultured meat, produced by growing animal stem cells in vitro, represents a promising alternative to conventional meat production. It relies on tissue engineering techniques to guide cells through muscle formation, creating products that closely resemble traditional meat. However, a major barrier to scalability is the cost associated with cell culture media usually supplemented with expensive growth factors or fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is ethically problematic, and derived from animal slaughter.

The "NanoMeat" project provides a more cost-effective and ethical solution through the use of scaffolds with carriers for cell attachment and recombinant growth factor delivery, offering the advantages of controlled release, greater efficacy and lower costs. The NanoMeat project aims to use plant-derived viral-like nanoparticles (VNPs/VLPs) as carriers for growth factors and cell attachment peptides embedded on 3D hydrogels or scaffolds for the cost-effective production of cultured meat.

Fraunhofer IME will determine the optimal concentration of engineered VNPs for cell compatibility in 2D cell cultures and assess the proliferation, differentiation, and maturation of animal cells in 3D hydrogels/scaffolds containing RGD peptides and growth factors, all in FBS-free medium