John Yuen - New Harvest Fellowship Series

This episode is part of the New Harvest Fellowship Series. Learn more about New Harvest at https://new-harvest.org.

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

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