Graphical Abstract

Yup, Tasmanian Devil facial tumor disease is indeed pretty graphic.

It should be noted however that the transmission is limited to within a single species, which recently went through a population bottleneck that resulted in their immune systems having difficulty telling each other’s cells apart. Something like a bovine-to-human transmissible cancer would be orders of magnitude more unlikely.

synthetic meat would be made out of muscle cells which are not immortalized

Wouldn’t the end goal be to create immortal cell lines for the various cuts of meat? Otherwise, we need to keep (albeit much smaller) populations of livestock around to continually harvest new cells from.