Stem Cell Production Breakthrough

A team combining scientists from The University of Nottingham’s Wolfson Centre for Stem Cells, Tissue Engineering and Modelling, Uppsala University and GE Healthcare in Sweden, have identified an improved method for human stem cell culture that could lead to quicker and cheaper large scale industrial production.

The research* was started at Uppsala University in Sweden by first author, Dr Sara Pijuan-Galitó, who s now continuing her work as a Swedish Research Council Research Fellow at Nottingham. Sara said: “By using a protein derived from human blood called Inter-alpha inhibitor, we have grown human pluripotent stem cells in a minimal medium without the need for costly and time-consuming biological substrates. Inter-alpha inhibitor is found in human blood at high concentrations and is currently a by-product of standard drug purification schemes.

“The protein can make stem cells attach on unmodified tissue culture plastic, and improve survival of the stem cells in harsh conditions. It is the first stem cell culture method that does not require a pre-treated biological substrate for attachment, and therefore, is more cost and time-efficient and paves the way for easier and cheaper large-scale production.”

Lead supervisor Dr Cecilia Annerén, who has a joint position at Uppsala University and at GE Healthcare in Uppsala, said: “As coating is a time-consuming step and adds cost to human stem cell culture, this new method has the potential to save time and money in large-scale and high-throughput cultures, and be highly valuable for both basic research and commercial applications.”

Co-author on the paper Dr Cathy Merry added: “We now intend to combine Inter-alpha inhibitor protein with our innovative hydrogel technology to improve on current methods to control cell differentiation and apply it to disease modelling. This will help research into many diseases but our focus is on understanding rare conditions like Multiple Osteochondroma (an inherited disease associated with painful lumps developing on bones) at the cellular level. Our aim is to replicate the 3 dimensional environment that cells experience in the body so that our lab-bench biology is more accurate in modelling diseases.”

*Published July 13 2016 in Nature Communications.