LAB-grown meat: Economics, challenges and prospects

In the cultured meat production system is a strange idea to produce meat without involving animals; the use of animals here is to donate a suitable cell. The technology behind this new idea is just the extension of biotechnology, that is, tissue engineering techniques. In vitro meat is an innovative and emerging technology to produce animal-free meat by culturing stem cells derived from farm animals in a laboratory within a bioreactor under artificial conditions. In vitro, the meat production system is a recent area that has astonished everyone with its benefits for ecological and animal welfare issues. Cell and tissue culture are the most commonly used tissue engineering techniques to produce in vitro meat. Other new methods, such as Organ printing, Biophotonics and Nanotechnology, will be more theoretical in upcoming years. A current meat production system is associated with several adverse consequences, such as the poor nutritional value of meat, food-borne diseases, depletion of environmental resources, pollution, and ethical issues. This new way of animal-free meat production may offer health benefits by reducing the ill effects of the current meat production system and will also ensure sustainable production of designer, chemically safe and disease-free meat as the conditions in an in vitro meat production system are controllable and changeable. The current meat scenario is increasing rapidly in terms of public demand; thus, this new method could supply the global market for meat. However, there are many challenges in producing in vitro meat as a sustainable product at an industrial scale. A significant body of research on consumer acceptance and low cost is at the central point of the production system. Many materials used in product development are novel and untested and demand urgent regulatory and safety assessment systems. In vitro, the meat production system is still in the early stages of development. It requires in-depth research and advanced skills to make this production system feasible commercially.