Better Way to Grow Stem Cells Developed

Human pluripotent stem cells, which can become any other kind of body cell, hold great potential to treat a wide range of ailments, including Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries.

However, scientists who work with such cells have had trouble growing large enough quantities to perform experiments -- in particular, to be used in human studies. Furthermore, most materials now used to grow human stem cells include cells or proteins that come from mice embryos, which help stimulate stem-cell growth but would likely cause an immune reaction if injected into a human patient.

To overcome those issues, MIT chemical engineers, materials scientists and biologists have devised a synthetic surface that includes no foreign animal material and allows stem cells to stay alive and continue reproducing themselves for at least three months. It's also the first synthetic material that allows single cells to form colonies of identical cells, which is necessary to identify cells with desired traits and has been difficult to achieve with existing materials.

Original Paper:

Ying Mei, Krishanu Saha, Said R. Bogatyrev, Jing Yang, Andrew L. Hook, Z. Ilke Kalcioglu, Seung-Woo Cho, Maisam Mitalipova, Neena Pyzocha, Fredrick Rojas, Krystyn J. Van Vliet, Martyn C. Davies, Morgan R. Alexander, Robert Langer, Rudolf Jaenisch and Daniel G. Anderson. Combinatorial development of biomaterials for clonal growth of human pluripotent stem cells. Nature Materials, 2010; DOI: 10.1038/nmat2812

For more information:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/stem-cells-0823.html