As cultivated meat develops, an important challenge is moving from growing individual cells to building something that behaves more like actual meat. Muscle and fat contribute differently to the structure, texture, and composition we associate with meat. A new patent application from Seoul National University explores how these two cell types could be grown together in a deliberately organized structure.
Building Meat in Layers
The filing describes a core-shell hydrogel designed to culture muscle and adipose cells within the same structure [WO2026111542A1]. One cell type occupies the inner core, while the other forms a surrounding shell.
This architecture is the key feature of the invention. In many earlier hydrogel-based approaches, different cell types have been cultured separately, or a shell has primarily served to protect cells in the core. This can make it difficult to recreate the spatial relationship between muscle and fat found in biological tissue.
Here, both the core and shell have a biological role. Muscle stem cells and adipose precursor cells are mixed with hydrogels and then extruded together through a microfluidic device, creating a continuous core-shell structure. The application describes gelatin for the muscle component and alginate for the adipose component. The core can be 500-800 μm across, surrounded by a shell roughly 50–300 μm thick.
The inventors report that the two cell populations could differentiate and develop within their respective regions while being cultured together. The approach therefore provides a way to combine cell diversity with spatial organization, two features that are important when attempting to engineer tissue rather than simply produce cell biomass.
SNU’s Research Meets Food Innovation
Seoul National University R&DB Foundation supports the university’s research commercialization, intellectual property management, and industry collaboration. The filing reflects research at the intersection of SNU’s cultivated-meat work and its expertise in biomaterials and 3D cell culture.
The research team has also investigated hydrogel properties for improving the maturation and functional characteristics of cultured porcine fat, highlighting a broader effort to engineer both muscle and adipose components of cultivated meat.
Designing the Structure of Meat
Congratulations and a warm thank you to the inventors: Cheorun Jo, Minsu Kim, Hyun Young Jung, Jinho Hyun, and Hyun Taek Han, for developing a thoughtful approach to recreating the spatial organization of muscle and fat within cultivated meat.
About the Author
I am Nidhi Mote, a biomedical scientist and science communicator with a PhD where I spent years building tiny 3D models of blood vessels (because apparently regular-sized biology wasn't complicated enough). My background sits at the crossroads of bioengineering and cell biology, and these days I channel that into writing about the futures being quietly built in labs, from cellular agriculture to next-gen biotech. I care about making science legible, exciting, and maybe even a little beautiful, which is why I am equally likely to reach for a pen as I am a pipette. When I am not writing, I am doodling diagrams that probably explain things better than my words do. Based in Hamburg, always happy to talk about tissue engineering, cellular agriculture, and connect with like-minded folks.
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This article is based on publicly available information. Lab Grown Technologies is not affiliated with the inventors or organizations mentioned.