Let’s talk about lab-grown meat. Not just the mincemeat-in-a-petri-dish stuff we’ve all seen plastered across thinkpieces, but the proper, steak-like, chew-with-your-molars kind. The kind that might one day fool your grandma into thinking it's from a bird that once clucked. In Trends in Biotechnology this week, researchers from the University of Tokyo have cooked up—well, not literally—a solution that brings us closer to that reality. And they did it using a device that, in all seriousness, shares parts with your Brita filter.

The Plumbing of Protein: How Hollow Fibers Mimic Blood Vessels

At the heart of this effort is a bioreactor built around hollow fibers—thin, semipermeable tubes that function much like capillaries, supplying nutrients and oxygen to cells as if they were living in a body. These aren’t newfangled inventions: they’re already workhorses in dialysis machines and water purification. But here, they’ve been repurposed into a perfusion system that allows actual chicken muscle tissue to grow thick, juicy, and structured, not flat like a pancake.

“We’re mimicking the circulatory system,” says Professor Shoji Takeuchi, the study’s senior author. “By threading nutrients through these fibers, we can go beyond the usual tissue thickness limit of about a millimeter, where cells tend to starve in the middle.” It’s a simple problem with an elegant, if slightly surreal, solution: build a vascular system out of plumbing parts.

Robot Poultry, Sort Of: Scaling Up Structured Chicken

The team didn’t stop at a proof of concept. They scaled things up—with robot-assisted precision, no less—to produce over 10 grams of chicken muscle in a single slab. This might not sound like much to the average carnivore, but in the world of cultured meat, that’s practically a rotisserie revolution. They used chicken fibroblasts (cells that contribute to connective tissue) and aligned them within a network of 1,125 hollow fibers to create what’s called a “whole-cut” meat product—think chicken breast, not nuggets.

The implications are significant. Cultured meat, with its lower environmental footprint and lack of animal suffering, has long been hailed as the protein of the future. But replicating the fibrous texture and taste of traditional meat has been a persistent stumbling block. “Our system improves not only cell viability and structure but also food-related properties like texture and flavor,” Takeuchi says. That’s lab-speak for: it might actually taste like chicken.

From Dinner to Drug Testing: Bigger Applications in Sight

Beyond your plate, the implications stretch even further. “This could also be used in regenerative medicine, drug testing, and soft robotics,” Takeuchi notes, with the kind of restrained optimism that scientists use when they’ve built something that could one day make replacement organs—or robot limbs that flex like the real deal.

Still, there’s work to be done. The team acknowledges that scaling this up for industrial production means grappling with oxygen delivery across even larger tissues, automating the tricky process of removing the fibers post-growth, and switching to materials that are actually edible—or at least non-toxic. Possible future upgrades include artificial oxygen carriers to play the part of red blood cells, or edible fiber scaffolds that don’t need to be removed at all. The vision? A plug-and-play system for growing meat—or muscle—for whatever application you fancy.

As ever in science, it’s a story of incremental progress: clever reuse of existing technology, a dash of robotic engineering, and a healthy helping of cell biology. Add in a pinch of curiosity and you might just get a lab-grown chicken breast that looks, feels, and tastes like the real thing.

Just, you know, don’t ask it to lay eggs.