Bovine stem cells offer new approach to future cultivated steak research

Cultivated meat aims to produce meat from animal cells in the laboratory without needing to raise a living animal for meat production. It has been proposed as a potentially more sustainable alternative to conventional meat production. Yet recreating something as complex as a steak—rather than minced meat—remains a major scientific challenge.

Now, researchers at EMBL Barcelona have developed a method to grow self-organizing bovine tissues containing muscle, nerve and blood vessel cells from a laboratory-grown line of bovine embryonic stem cells. The work provides a new platform for studying tissue formation and could help advance future cultivated meat technologies. The work has been published in Nature Communications.

Embryonic cells broaden the toolkit

Current approaches to cultivated beef typically rely on stem cells taken from adult cows. While these cells can produce muscle, they have limited capacity to divide and are already committed to becoming only certain types of tissue. This makes it difficult to recreate the diversity of cell types found in real meat.

Miki Ebisuya, former group leader at EMBL Barcelona and current Humboldt professor at PoL-TU Dresden, and her team used an established line of bovine embryonic stem cells that can be grown and multiplied in the laboratory over long periods. Unlike adult cells, embryonic stem cells can proliferate for long periods and retain the ability to develop into many different cell types. By carefully guiding their development, the researchers generated three key components of muscle tissue simultaneously: skeletal muscle cells, neurons and endothelial cells, which can create blood vessels. Remarkably, the cells organized themselves into three-dimensional tissue-like aggregates without requiring complex assembly techniques.

“One of the biggest challenges in cultivated meat is reproducing the complexity of real tissue,” said Marina Sanaki-Matsumiya, former postdoctoral fellow at the Ebisuya Group and current assistant professor at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. “Instead of growing each cell type separately and assembling them afterward, we showed that embryonic stem cells can develop together and self-organize, mimicking real tissue development.”

Early tissues with vessel-like networks

Being able to develop endothelial cells is particularly important. In living tissues, blood vessels deliver oxygen and nutrients, allowing tissues to grow larger and remain healthy. Although the blood vessel-like networks formed in this study are still primitive, they represent an important step toward creating bigger, more complex cultured tissues.

Using the protocol developed by the Ebisuya Group, the researchers produced 3D aggregates of 0.6 mm in diameter in 15 days. Although these tissues are exceptionally small, they contain an important level of cellular complexity. In each of the aggregates, muscle fibers formed alongside networks of endothelial cells and spinal neurons that interacted with the muscle, showing that multiple interacting tissue types can be generated together from the same developmental process rather than assembled from derived adult cell types.

The researchers point out that this work is an early proof of concept rather than a recipe for producing cultivated steaks.

“The tissue we generated is still very small,” said Ebisuya. “To produce something resembling a steak, we will need much larger tissues with more mature blood vessel networks that can support continued growth.”

Costs and scale remain hurdles

Another major challenge is cost. Growing embryonic stem cells and directing their development currently requires expensive cell culture media and reagents, which makes large-scale food production economically unfeasible.

Beyond food production, the work also provides a powerful model for understanding how muscle tissues develop. Since the system contains multiple interacting cell types, it could help researchers investigate muscle development and tissue engineering in ways that are difficult to achieve with simpler cell cultures.

Although cultivated steaks are still far from becoming reality, the study demonstrates that embryonic stem cells can generate several of the essential cellular ingredients in a single, self-organizing system. By bringing muscle, nerve and blood vessel cells together, the work lays important groundwork for building more complex cultured tissues in the future.

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Gaby Clark

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Robert Egan

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