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New material forges the way for ‘stem cell factories’
Experts at The University of Nottingham have discovered the first fully synthetic substrate with potential to grow billions of stem cells. The research, funded by the EPSRC and led by Morgan Alexander, Professor of Biomedical Surfaces in the School of Pharmacy and Chris Denning, Professor of Stem Cell Biology in the School of Medicine could forge the way for the creation of ‘stem cell factories’ – the mass production of human embryonic (pluripotent) stem cells. The material could provide an off-the-shelf product for clinical use in the treatment of the heart, liver and brain. Find the full press release here. The news has also been promoted on many other sites including the Stem Cells Portal and GEN News. This research is part of the £2.3m project, ‘Discovery of a Novel Polymer for Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Expansion and Multilineage Differentiation’. The relevant publications can be found below:
• A defined synthetic substrate for serum-free culture of human stem cell derived cardiomyocytes with improved functional maturity identified using combinatorial materials microarrays
• Discovery of a Novel Polymer for Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Expansion and Multilineage Differentiation
• Chemically diverse polymer microarrays and high throughput surface characterisation: a method for discovery of materials for stem cell culture
• Materials for stem cell factories of the future
Image reproduced from here