Abstract
Cultured meat is a tissue engineering-based cellular agriculture application that may enable the production of meat in a way that could sidestep the numerous issues with intensive animal agriculture. However, affordability is a fundamental prerequisite to the realization of cultured meat's potential benefits. Continuous processing, characterized by the continuous flow of raw materials in and finished products out of the process, is a form of process intensification that could potentially reduce cultured meat capital investment-dependent production costs through increased equipment utilization and productivity. Aspects of a continuous cultured meat process have been demonstrated, but feasibility challenges remain---media perfusion technology is utilized in other cell culture applications, but scalability remains a challenge; lab-scale continuous harvest of suspension cells and process integration has been demonstrated, but the impact of cultured meat specific considerations remains a knowledge gap; and lab-scale continuous detachment of adherent cells has been demonstrated, but adaptation to a bioreactor and cell type relevant to cultured meat remains untested. Since the value of addressing these unmet feasibility challenges depends on the comparative advantage of continuous over batch processing, the aim of this thesis was to quantify the value proposition of continuous versus batch processing for the expansion step of the cultured meat production process, accounting for the range of potential process designs and culminating in the evaluation of a hollow-fiber membrane bioreactor (HFB)-based continuous process.To achieve this aim, (i) a previous study that found batch processing preferable---as measured by cost of production---to continuous was analyzed in this thesis through scenario testing and sensitivity analysis, identifying specific and feasible model modifications that increased the value proposition of continuous processing and made it preferable to batch---as measured by both spatiotemporal efficiency and cost of production, (ii) a novel model and evaluation framework that can be widely utilized independent of bioreactor design was developed and leveraged to define, for the first time, batch preferred and continuous preferred design regions based on space-time yield, bioreactor scalability, and supporting equipment costs; and (iii) the model and framework were utilized to evaluate, for the first time, an HFB-based continuous seed train process.
In quantifying the value proposition of continuous processing across a range of potential process designs and in an HFB-based process, this thesis highlighted that neither batch nor continuous processing is conclusively superior, but batch preferred and continuous preferred design regions can indicate specific processes and conditions under which each approach is most beneficial.
| Date of Award | 8 Oct 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Marianne Ellis (Supervisor) & Marcelle McManus (Supervisor) |