New Culture Dish Helps Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research

A new synthetic Petri dish coating could overcome a major hurdle to the advancement of human embryonic stem cell research.

Under current regulations, current stem cell lines have limitations in yielding human therapies because the cells have been grown on animal-based substances that do not behave in expected ways. "These nondefined, animal-based components create issues with the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] and hinder clinical applications,” said Dr. Joerg Lahann, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan (U-M; Ann Arbor, USA).

Dr. Lahann and Dr. Gary Smith, an associate professor in obstetrics and gynecology in the U-M Health System, and their coworkers constructed a new stem cell growth matrix that is completely synthetic and does not contaminate the stem cells with foreign substances that could interfere with their normal function. An article on the research was published online, on June 2010 in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Today's most typically used matrices are mouse embryonic fibroblast cells and Matrigel, which is made from mouse tumors. "The problem is that the mouse-derived cells have batch-to-batch variability, and they secrete factors that nobody really understands. Stem cells are very sensitive to their environment,” Dr. Lahann said.

The unknown factors hamper researchers' attempts to pinpoint how and under what conditions stem cells differentiate--questions paramount to the development of future stem cell therapies.

The team evaluated six different polymer coatings and found that a water-soluble gel with the acronym PMEDSAH performed well when attached to the Petri dish even after 25 rounds of harvesting stem cells to grow new colonies. "We have designed a fully synthetic, fully chemically defined hydrogel that has long-term stability and no batch-to-batch variability,” Dr. Smith noted. "Moreover, we have established that it can be used for long-term growth of human embryonic stem cells while maintaining all of their known normal functions. These include normal genetic makeup, lack of spontaneous differentiation, and maintenance of pluripotency, which means they can still become any cell type of the human body. This is a perfect example of an interdisciplinary collaboration leading to information gained and future discovery of cures and improvements of human health.”

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