Industry News: CombiCult® Technology Amplifies Stem Cells in Umbilical Cord Blood

Plasticell, the leader in high through-put technology to develop stem cell therapies in regenerative medicine, has announced the publication of peer-reviewed scientific research in the journal Stem Cells and Development, which demonstrates how the company’s award-winning platform technology can be used to discover novel cell culture protocols that expand specific populations of therapeutic stem cells present in cord blood.

Hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantation, the most successful and common stem cell therapy to date, is used to treat a wide variety of hematological disorders. Banked cord blood (CB) has several advantages over alternative sources of HSCs, as it is readily available, tested and banked ahead of use, contains more immature HSC and is associated with fewer cases of graft versus host disease. However, each CB unit contains too few stem cells to treat older children and adult patients, therefore methods of amplifying these rare stem cells within CB are required.

The publication describes the application of CombiCult® technology to accelerate the discovery of media formulations and cell culture protocols for the in vitro expansion of HSCs without compromising their functional characteristics.

Dr. Yen Choo, Executive Chairman of Plasticell, commented: “Our results demonstrate that in addition to particular combinations of growth factors, it is also the order in which they are added to the cell culture that influences the expansion of HSCs. Therefore, systematic searches of temporal and combinatorial variables can be used to derive optimal protocols for cell expansion.’