Robin Maatz, M.Sc.

In the field of in vitro meat production, it is of great interest to develop products that are very similar in structure to real meat. Public and political interest in reducing factory farming and the associated agricultural CO2 pollution reinforces the need for this. It is already possible to produce structured products using established technologies from areas such as tissue engineering and plant-based meat substitutes. However, all alternative technologies have in common that they are poorly scalable or cannot produce a suitable structure. Screen printing, on the other hand, is characterized by its simplicity, low cost and scalability, and is already being used i.e. for mass production of electronic components. It is therefore suitable for the industrial mass production of multilayer hydrogel structures.

In the area of “BioMedical Printing Technology”, I am researching a process development of an industrial screen printing process that can be used for the production of versatile structured in vitro meat products. The concepts of the process are first developed on a laboratory scale and then transferred to an automated industrial printing machine. Research for this project includes the development of suitable bioinks using rheological, microscopic and cell biological methods. In addition, their printability into 3-dimensional structured layers will be investigated, as well as the subsequent cultivation in the bioreactor.