Albumin-Free Protocol Cuts Cost, Supports Large-Scale Cardiomyocyte Production
CHEMICALLY DEFINED ALBUMIN-FREE CONDITIONS FOR CARDIOMYOCYTE DIFFERENTIATION OF HUMAN PLURIPOTENT STEM CELLS
Method is fully defined and xeno free.Efficient and cost effectiveSimplifies stepsFacilitates translation to regenerative therapies
Inexpensive and reproducible generation of cardiomyocyte progenitors and cardiomyocytes from PSCs
Generating cardiovascular cells from pluripotent stem cells holds profound promise for research and therapy, and the past 10 years have witnessed rapid methodological advances for creating de novo human cardiomyocytes. In particular, the ability of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) to differentiate to cells in cardiac lineages has attracted significant interest, with a strong focus on in vitro modeling, drug discovery, safety pharmacology and cell therapy.However, all existing protocols for differentiating hPSCs to cardiomyocytes use albumin, which increases cost and may introduce xenogenic components, limiting the potential for large-scale production. The use of recombinant albumin addresses some of these issues (e.g., batch-to-batch variability) but is prohibitively expensive at commercial scale. Accordingly, there is a clear need for a new cardiac differentiation protocol that uses fully defined culture conditions without relying on albumin or other substances previously thought essential.UW–Madison researchers have developed a method for generating high yield, high purity cardiomyocytes/progenitors from PSCs under defined, albumin-free conditions. Their discovery that albumin is not necessary, and may even be deleterious, for cardiomyocyte differentiation dramatically reduces the cost of production.
Sep 10, 2015
9,765,299
USA
