| 1 | REPROCELL | Bioreactor Culture of iPSC's with ABLE Biott | REPROCELL | 1883 | 26 | 1 | 46.8 | neutral | 4:18 | The human body consists of about 60 trillion cells. And all tissues and organs are cell assemblies. It all begins with one fertilised egg, which divides repeatedly and changes into various types of specialised cells to form tissues and organs. These processes to determine the roles of cells are called differentiation, a cell which has differentiated once in the body will never return to its undifferentiated stage and its proliferative abilities also limited. This means that organs and tissues that are lost or damaged due to accidents or diseases cannot be regenerated in many cases. However, this conventional wisdom has been fully overtaken by IPS cell technology. Transducing just four genes into differentiated cells made it possible to return them to the undifferentiated stage. As IPS cells have the ability to differentiate into any type of cells throughout the body and also have a high proliferative ability, it is now possible to realise regenerative treatment through the fabrication of alternate tissues and organs. For that purpose, large-scale IPS cell culture technology is required. Heart disease treatment, for example, needs more than one billion cells. To culture so many cells, manually it demands a huge number of culture solutions and considerable time, as you can see here. To solve this issue, our research team tried using the 3D stirred suspension culture system, which uses a reactor. The impeler of the reactor agitates the culture medium three-dimensionally. Undifferentiated cells with a high proliferative ability will increase in number through division and then form cell aggregations. However, human IPS cells are vulnerable to physical stress. If the flow of the culture medium is disturbed, they collide with other cells or the reactor's impellers and do not proliferate well. To counter this problem, the research team revised the shape of the reactor's impellers. As a result, the culture medium began flowing literally at a constant rate and collisions with other cells or the impellers ceased. Using just one reactor, we could successfully culture as many human IPS cells as when using 50 culture dishes. Compared to the conventional manual method, this has realized a space-saving, highly efficient and low cost method of cell culture. Through the administration of certain proteins and compounds, we successfully achieved highly efficient differentiation into myocardial cells. To provide the large quantity of IPS cells that will be required for future regenerative medicine research, we are planning to produce larger reactors and increase their number. With the mass supply of IPS cells, regenerative medicine will move on to a new stage. R&D and the drug development field will be accelerated by using tissues made from IPS cells instead of those from laboratory animals. In addition, clinical applications using IPS cells for various human tissues are about to start. Our ultimate aim is the fabrication of organs. To operate regenerative medicine technologies in an integrated manner, we will complete the organ factory, thereby forging a new treatment path for countless numbers of patients. | ↗ |