Abstract
Recent advances in neural differentiation technology have paved the way to generate clinical grade neural progenitor populations from human pluripotent stem cells. These cells are an excellent source for the production of neural cell-based therapeutic products to treat incurable central nervous system disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injuries. This progress can be complemented by the development of robust bioprocessing technologies for large scale expansion of clinical grade neural progenitors under GMP conditions for promising clinical use and drug discovery applications. Here, we describe a protocol for a robust, scalable expansion of human neural progenitor cells from pluripotent stem cells as 3D aggregates in a stirred suspension bioreactor. The use of this platform has resulted in easily expansion of neural progenitor cells for several passages with a fold increase of up to 4.2 over a period of 5 days compared to a maximum 1.5–2-fold increase in the adherent static culture over a 1 week period. In the bioreactor culture, these cells maintained self-renewal, karyotype stability, and cloning efficiency capabilities. This approach can be also used for human neural progenitor cells derived from other sources such as the human fetal brain.
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded by grants provided from Royan Institute, the Iranian Council of Stem Cell Research and Technology, the Iran National Science Foundation (INSF), and Iran Science Elites Federation.
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Nemati, S., Abbasalizadeh, S., Baharvand, H. (2015). Scalable Expansion of Human Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Neural Progenitors in Stirred Suspension Bioreactor Under Xeno-free Condition. In: Turksen, K. (eds) Bioreactors in Stem Cell Biology. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1502. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/7651_2015_318
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/7651_2015_318
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