关键词: 培养肉, 生物反应器, 微载体, 传质, 混合, 过程放大

Abstract: The idea of culturing animal muscle tissues in vitro as food stocks for human consumption was conceptualised as early as 1930s and patented in the 1990s, but the technique has not been proven at an industrially relevant scale as of today. In the past five years or so, cultured meat enjoyed a surge of popularity in terms of media coverage, particularly since the high profile taste-test event of the first lab-grown beef burger in 2013. Over two dozens of companies have joined the effort to bring cultured meat to the market, but a consumer-ready product is yet to be seen. In addition to regulatory requirements and socio-ethical implications, a major bottle-neck that is hindering the implementation of large scale cultured meat production is the lack of an understanding of the scaling-up effects on animal cells, including mass transfer, heat transfer, mixing and shear stress, etc. Conventionally, animal cells and tissues are mostly cultured in the high-value, low-volume pharmaceutical industry. Even production facilities that are considered high-throughput are typically clusters of small production lines under 2?20 m3 running in parallel, where the homogeneity of the culturing environment is relatively easily maintained. Cultured meat from animal muscle cell cultivation as a commodity to compete with the agriculture industry demands volumes of bioreactors and cell densities at least an order of magnitude higher than what the current technology can provide. Significant progresses in the development of bioreactor technology are required to make cultured meat a commercially viable alternative source of animal protein. In this review, the bioreactor aspects of cultured meat production, including reactor type and operation mode were covered, as well as existing drawbacks and potential solutions.

Key words: cultured meat, bioreactor, microcarrier, mass transfer, mixing, scaling-up