Next-Generation Foods: Engineering Optimized, Enhanced, and Personalized Foods through Cellular Agriculture
** Lecture will be given in English**
Abstract:
Cellular agriculture is an emerging discipline that uses cell culture technologies to produce foods traditionally derived from animals or crops, offering a sustainable and ethical alternative to conventional agriculture. Beyond reducing environmental impact and improving food security, cultivated foods enable precise control over composition, structure, and nutritional value, allowing the development of foods that can surpass their conventional counterparts.
This seminar presents research directions demonstrating the potential of cultivated foods. First, I will describe our work on the development of cultivated foie gras using edible, plant-based 3D scaffolds that support the growth and lipid accumulation of chicken hepatocytes. In this system, pea-protein scaffolds promoted significantly greater triglyceride deposition, and yielded fatty acid profiles closely resembling traditional duck foie gras. Strategies to enrich the tissues with essential ω-3 fatty acids further demonstrated how cellular agriculture can enable the production of foods with enhanced nutritional value. Next, I will discuss our efforts to engineer cultivated meat tissues with elevated antioxidant content to improve stability, quality, and potential health benefits for consumers. Finally, I will present a novel human intestine organoid–based model that enables the evaluation of food absorption.
Together, these studies highlight the potential of cellular agriculture to advance high-quality, nutritionally optimized, sustainable foods, paving the way for personalized next-generation food systems.
