A major challenge in cell-based meat production is the development of a method of mass-producing culture medium that is myogenic, cost-effective, and safe. Traditionally, this objective has been met through supplementation with exogenous growth factors commonly harvested from the fetuses of livestock. Other than being an expensive process, yielding low levels of bioactive factors, this approach also invokes ethical issues surrounding animal cruelty as well as incurs a negative environmental impact. The unmet need was hence a manner to effectively stimulate growth factor release during in vitro meat cultivation with minimal intervention.
The BICEPS laboratory has developed a method to harness the benefits of mitochondrial respiration through magnetic exposure, thus enhancing myokine release, and myogenesis. A single 10 min exposure of donor muscle cells to correctly oriented magnetic fields produces a pCM that after only 30 min of conditioning is capable of enhancing the basal growth of naïve recipient cells by ~50%, demonstrating the adequacy and potency of the magnetically induced muscle secretome to promote myogenesis. Indeed, pCM was better able to promote the growth and survival of myoblasts than fetal bovine serum.
Mechanical stimulation is another manner to stimulate myokine release but is difficult to achieve in conventional bioreactor paradigms with high acuity and uniformity to all cells. The application of mechanical forces to cells in suspension cultures is lossy and dissipative as
freely floating cells largely travel with the flow of the fluid with a minimum of substrate-mediated counterforces that are necessary to produce the shear stresses necessary to instigate secretome release. By contrast, magnetic activation stimulates muscle cells in suspension uniformly and with high temporal acuity and secretome release appears to be very efficient.
Moreover, such a magnetic approach would also be clean, humane and commandeer the innate ability of muscles to support their own development with the production of essential growth factors. The ultimate objective would be to reduce the need for exogenous supplementation with animal serum or purified myokines as well as drugs, antibiotics, or genetic modification.
