Cultivated meat faces three serious obstacles: cost, scale of production and a taste that still falls short of conventional meat. The team behind the European PROFUSE project decided to tackle what matters most in a steak: muscle tissue. The researchers developed a supplement that speeds up muscle cell maturation and a non-GM bovine cell line, and first tests with producers brought lower costs per kilogram — and at the end you can check how open you are to the food of the future.
Meat production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. That is why alternative sources of protein can be a powerful tool in the EU’s transition towards climate neutrality. One such source is cultivated meat, for which demand is growing.
On the supply side, things look worse. Production costs are still high, processes are hard to scale, and many products still struggle to reproduce the texture, flavour and nutrient profile of conventional meat.
Guy Nevo Michrowski, coordinator of the PROFUSE project, which is supported by the European Innovation Council (EIC), knows these problems well. “Cultivated meat has three big challenges ahead of it: cost parity with farm-grown meat, scale-up, and quality and taste,” he explains.
The team decided to respond by focusing on muscle tissue. “We specialise in enabling technologies for growing muscle. Steak is muscle, chicken breast is muscle,” says Michrowski. The project did not start from scratch. It builds on earlier work funded by the European Research Council (ERC) through the SuperFusion project, which worked on a method to induce muscle fibre formation for industrial meat production.
PROFUSE worked on several areas at the same time:
The key product is PROFUSE-S1. It is designed to help young muscle cells, known as myoblasts, become fully mature muscle fibres much faster and more efficiently. This matters because muscle fibre is what gives meat much of its texture, structure and protein content. Media supplements, for context, are ingredients added to the nutrient-rich liquid used to grow cells.
The team also advanced a second generation of the supplement, called PROFUSE-S2. “The main goal was not just to do everything on a 2D surface, but to test it in a 3D system that more closely mimics how cultivated meat would be produced in a factory and how a steak looks on the plate,” says the coordinator.
The choice of cells was not accidental. PROFUSE focused on myoblasts: precursor cells that grow into muscle. According to the team, this helps to mimic the texture and flavour of meat. Other approaches rely on fibroblasts, which are connective tissue precursors, and some cultivated meat producers use embryonic stem cells.
The researchers also worked on a bovine muscle cell line adapted for cultivated meat production without genetic modification. The aim was to give producers a reliable source of beef muscle cells that could be grown at scale.
An important stage was taking the technology beyond the lab. The team worked with several cultivated meat producers to test the supplement and the bovine cell line in their own production processes.
One collaboration, with the company SuperMeat, showed a reduction in production costs. The supplement helped the customer save time, accelerate the maturation of cells into functional muscle tissue and significantly increase overall muscle yield, ultimately reducing the production cost per kilogram. The bovine cell line was also tested with a large customer in the Netherlands, where the initial adaptation was successful. This laid the groundwork for future integration as production timelines align.
At the same time, the team adapted its PROFUSE-B8 cell line to grow in a serum media, and tested how well the cells formed muscle on structures designed to support tissue growth.
The products were prepared for commercial use. The team developed product and licensing models, put together a complete regulatory safety dossier, mapped potential partners and suppliers, and began proof of concept work to show where the technology could save time and cost. The cultivated meat market is still maturing, but the team estimates a total available market of EUR 22 billion by 2050. The technology could also reduce the environmental footprint of food production, a key aim of the EU’s farm to fork strategy.
Knowledge about muscle growth is useful outside the food industry too. The researchers are applying it to drug discovery and dietary supplement discovery, hoping to address muscle loss associated with GLP-1 drugs. This work could eventually feed back into cultivated meat, since in both cases the underlying challenge is the same: growing muscle more effectively. “Anything that we discover now that can help protect muscle and grow muscle can be used again in cultivated meat,” Michrowski concludes.
The PROFUSE project shows that the road to cheaper and tastier cultivated meat runs through muscle tissue. Supplements that speed up the maturation of myoblasts and a non-genetically modified bovine cell line have already passed their first trials with producers, and the team’s experience may also prove useful in work on muscle loss.
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