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SALT LAKE CITY — Succulent. Juicy. Beefy. Doesn't even taste like it was grown in a petri dish.
That's what you might be saying someday about the steak or burger on your plate. Intrepid scientists at MIT and University of Pennsylvania have put the marvel of 3D printing to good use (finally) and invented a way to make lab-grown tissue more realistic, and hopefully more edible.
There's still some surprise that it's even possible to grow meat (and organs and skin - basically any tissue) in a lab without an actual animal attached to it. Well, it is possible, but it's a little gruesome and a lot difficult. One big issue is that it has been tough to grow tissue that is more than a few cells thick. Whatever you're growing is basically fed by a slurry of nutrients surrounding the tissue, and as soon as the tissue is thick enough, those nutrients, as well as oxygen, can't get inside any longer.
So Pennsylvania scientists decided to make their own blood vessels to bring both nutrients and oxygen to lab-grown tissues. They used a 3D printer and some sugar to create tubes of "carbohydrate glass." These were sent to researchers at MIT, who surrounded the tubes with the only dessert less appetizing than green Jell-O — liver cell Jell-O.
"It's very similar to Jell-O," researcher Jordan Miller told MSNBC, even though it's probably much more complicated than that. Regardless, in about a half-hour, it sets hard and the printed vessels are washed away, leaving tubes in the gel that can be used to pump nutrients and oxygen into the newly formed cube of tissue. Yeah. It's in cube form.
I think it's justified that it's not being well-funded or heavily pursued because it doesn't serve an obvious need. It's not at all obvious that it'd be an efficient way to generate biomass.
–Jordan Miller
Not only was the artificial tissue more than just a few cells thick, the liver cells were much healthier than the non-carbohydrate-glass-vasculated version. Which is great news for folks like Miller who want to use their idea to make organs — kidneys and (obviously) livers — for medical purposes. They're not so hot on the fake steak side of things, however.
"There's potential in that area," Miller said, even though he doesn't do that kind of research and doesn't want to. "I think it's justified that it's not being well-funded or heavily pursued because it doesn't serve an obvious need. It's not at all obvious that it'd be an efficient way to generate biomass."
Across the pond at Einhoven University in the Netherlands, a few scientists are betting otherwise. They have been focusing on muscle tissue and hope to have made a totally lab-grown hamburger by October.
Last year, they got the brilliant idea to use Velcro to exercise muscle tissue, making the muscle more realistic and, well, muscle like. You just attach each end of a petri-size strip and stretch it out. The tissue naturally responds by exercising itself and developing striations and even some primitive vascular tissue.
This can only be done with strips of meat a few centimeters long and wide. But if you take 3000 such strips, grind it up with some lab-grown fat tissue (that probably doesn't do as well with the Velcro-exercising) and you have roughly enough for a hamburger. That's exactly what they'll be eating soon enough. "In October we are going to provide a proof of concept showing out of stem cells we can make a product that looks, feels and hopefully tastes like meat," Dr. Mark Post who works with the team, told the Telegraph.
Hopefully whoever eats it will really, really enjoy it because it will likely be the most expensive hamburger ever made, costing roughly EUR250,000 to produce, or about $310,000. If only they chose to make meatballs instead, they could diffuse the inevitable buyer's remorse by exclaiming, "That's a spicy meatball!"
Post did tell the Telegraph think that adding blood vessels, an element that MIT has now brought to the table, will improve the product, but the artificial steak is still far off, perhaps as long as ten years. But a man with a grill can always dream.
