Spotlight on stem cells bioprocessing

Oeiras, 07.02.13

A review on the processing of human stem cells for clinical applications, recently published by ITQB and iBET researchers from the Animal Cell Technology Unit in the journal Trends in Biotechnology, has been included in a special collection of reviews - Trends Limited Edition - focusing on technological advances.

Stem cells, with their ability for extensive proliferation and multi-lineage differentiation, can serve as a renewable source of cellular material in regenerative medicine and toxicology. A pre-requisite for the transition of stem cells or their progeny to these fields is the establishment of efficient cell culture protocols for large-scale expansion, differentiation, storage and distribution. The major challenges in producing stem cell -derivatives are the scaling up of reproducible pure cell populations of undifferentiated cells without compromising their self-renewal ability and differentiation potential and the directed differentiation to specific cell types with improved differentiation efficiency, high purity and cell functionality.

In this review, the authors describe how human pluripotent stem cell (hPSCs), including embryonic and induced pluripotent cells, constitute an extremely attractive tool for cell therapy and discuss the latest advances in hPSCs process engineering, underlining why this is one of the main focusing areas of the Animal Cell Technology Unit.
 

Review article

Trends in Biotechnology (2012) 30(6): 350–359

Process engineering of human pluripotent stem cells for clinical application

Margarida Serra, Catarina Brito, Cláudia Correia, Paula M. Alves