

Stem cell therapy has great potential for treating diseased cardiac tissue. Such procedures require tremendous amounts of cells to be grown from patients’ own stem cells in a laboratory environment. Since such therapies are still in a research stage, dealing with a few patients is considerably more manageable than if such therapies are to come to full scale clinical application. In just a few years, we might be expecting clinical labs to be producing billions of new cells on a daily basis, so preparing for this scenario is its own challenge for making stem cell therapy accessible. Researchers at the University of Nottingham have now developed an artificial substrate that can serve as a platform on which large numbers of pluripotent stem cells can be made to grow and differentiate by the billion.

The polymer material is an excellent candidate because it is not subject to contamination, unlike naturally produced media harvested from animals. The researchers are now testing the technology in a number of trials, hopefully leading to stem cell therapy being soon used on a regular basis in hospitals worldwide.

Study in Advanced Materials: Discovery of a Novel Polymer for Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Expansion and Multilineage Differentiation…

Source: University of Nottingham…