Cook, Scarlet, McFarlane, Craig, and Hebbard, Lionel (2026) Tissue engineering approaches for cultivated leather. Discover Materials. (In Press)

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Abstract

Sourced from animal hides, leather continues to have a growing demand due to its durability and luxury appeal. Whilst demand grows, so does ethical and environmental concerns relating to the large amounts of waste and pollution generated by the leather manufacturing process. To address this, companies have developed alternative materials, but these may display poor performance, and some contribute to environmental pollution using plastic polymers. In response, advancements in cellular agriculture technologies and skin tissue engineering offer a promising solution to produce cultivated leather. The ability to mimic the collagen rich extracellular matrices (ECM) of animal hides using cultured fibroblasts could eliminate both environmental and ethical concerns whilst meeting traditional leather standards. However, challenges still arise, with additional research required for developing serum-free culture medium, scaffolding technologies and sustainable tanning methodologies. Additionally, cultivated leather needs the ability to be scalable whilst being cost effective, and capable of replacing both mammalian and exotic leather. Herein, we review the sustainability and characteristics of leather and its current alternatives, with a focus on the future potential and surrounding challenges of cultivated leather.

Item ID:	94515
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2730-7727
Copyright Information:	© The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Date Deposited:	28 Oct 2026 00:26
FoR Codes:	31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3101 Biochemistry and cell biology > 310199 Biochemistry and cell biology not elsewhere classified @ 100%
SEO Codes:	24 MANUFACTURING > 2411 Leather products, fibre processing and textiles > 241105 Skins, leather and leather products @ 100%
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