John Yuen - New Harvest Fellowship Series

<p>This episode is part of the New Harvest Fellowship Series. Learn more about New Harvest at https://new-harvest.org.</p> <p>John is a fourth year PhD Candidate working on cultured meat in the &nbsp;David Kaplan Laboratory, alongside Andrew Stout, Natalie Rubio, Ning &nbsp;Xiang, Michael Saad and Sophie Letche - a growing cell-ag team! John's &nbsp;goal is to develop scalable techniques to overcome the challenge of &nbsp;oxygen and nutrient delivery to cells within larger tissues. For &nbsp;example, it is often quoted that cells can only survive ~200 microns &nbsp;away from a blood vessel or other source of nutrition (e.g the culture &nbsp;media). This means that even a 1 mm thick tissue might encounter cell &nbsp;viability or survival issues within its core/central region. To address &nbsp;this, John is investigating methods to generate macroscale constructs of &nbsp;muscle and fat via perfused 3D tissue culture strategies. The hope is &nbsp;that methods to support cell survival in larger constructs will enable &nbsp;more advanced muscle and fat tissues to be grown in the future, &nbsp;containing the higher order, macroscale structural organization seen in &nbsp;products such as whole muscle cuts of meat. Imagine the large arrays of &nbsp;aligned muscle fibers seen in steak and chicken breast, etc.</p> --- Support this podcast: <a href="https://anchor.fm/futurefoodshow/support" rel="payment">https://anchor.fm/futurefoodshow/support</a>