Co-culture approaches for cultivated meat production

The need and demand for sustainable, nutritious and animal-welfare-conscious meat substitutes has spurred research into cultivated meat production. Meat mainly contains muscle and fat tissue, which can be fabricated using various tissue engineering strategies, including monoculture and co-culture approaches in different scaffolds. In this Review, we outline how co-culture approaches commonly used in biomedical tissue engineering can be applied to produce cultured meat. We discuss the relevant cell types and cell sources and examine different co-culture approaches for skeletal muscle and adipose tissue engineering. Finally, we discuss the application of such approaches for animal-free meat production, highlighting their potential to reduce cultured meat production costs, improve the organoleptic properties of cultured meat and increase tissue thickness.