Bioreactor Design and Engineering for Cultivated Meat Manufacturing.

Bioreactors encompass a wide spectrum of engineering concepts, yet for decades, industrial biotechnology has seen little fundamental innovation, with large-scale production mainly confined to stirred-tank and bubble-column reactors for microbial fermentations. In pharmaceutical biotechnology, various cultivation systems for eukaryotic cells are well established, including microcarrier processes, suspension in stirred vessels, and disposable bags or wave (rocking) bioreactors. However, these systems have typically been optimized to produce specific biomolecules, such as recombinant proteins, vaccines, or monoclonal antibodies, rather than for generating cellular biomass itself. The emergence of tissue engineering for medical applications brought new technological impulses, particularly in the development of scaffold materials and the spatial organization of cells in three-dimensional constructs. This was accompanied by advances in perfusion bioreactors, enabling sustained nutrient delivery and waste removal within thick tissue cultures. Such systems were designed for relatively small, high-value applications in regenerative medicine, but they provide valuable conceptual and technical groundwork for structured cultivated meat manufacturing. In cellular agriculture, the goal is to apply and adapt established bioprocessing knowledge to a new challenge: producing animal cells at food-relevant scales and costs. Rather than high-value, low-volume pharmaceutical production, the focus shifts to high-volume, cost-efficient food production. Achieving this will require interdisciplinary collaboration between bioprocess engineers, automation specialists, tissue engineers, cell biologists, and food technologists.