Dynamic Cultivation of Stem Cells

While human embryonic stem cells (hESC) hold promise for cell-based therapies, more and more, their medical relevance depends critically on the ability to expand them to large numbers without affecting their pluripotency. That is why scientists like Professor Oliver Brüstle, german stem cell pioneer and chief executive officer of Life & Brain GmbH, try to find out more about the conditions of cell growth and differentiation.

Brüstle has developed a scalable microcarrier-based process for the suspension culture of hESCs. He has recently set out to optimize this system employing a fully parallized cultivation system designed by DASGIP. This miniature system with a working volume of 50 mL is ideally suited to assay a variety of culture parameters and media conditions without the need for large cell numbers and large volumes of expensive cell culture media.

Currently DASGIP is supporting the group around Brüstle at the University of Bonn to optimize cultivation strategies for production cell lines and primary cells. High demands on experimental setup rank among the first vital results: In parallel trials the Brüstle team have found out that parameters such as pH, dissolved oxygen and shear forces have a high impact on the growth and differentiation of hESC, even when varying in subtle dimensions.

Other institutes in Europe and North-America recently have started to work with DASGIP’s Parallel Bioreactor Systems, too.

For more than 15 years DASGIP systems have been proven as effective research, development and scale-up tools for micro-organisms such as E.coli, Picha patoris, yeast and fungi, and mammalian cell lines such as CHO, NS0 and Hybridoma. The DASGIP team will make any effort to provide the stem cell community too with what they need to take their small scale experiments to the next level.

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