Bioprocess Development for the Large Scale Production and Differentiation of Adult Human Stem Cells

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Each tissue in the adult human body is composed of large numbers of specialized cells that carry out the functions associated with that tissue. There is increasing evidence that within each tissue, amongst those many specialized cells, is a very sparse population of adult stem cells. It is believed that the role of these adult stem cells is to maintain tissues in proper working order over the lifetime of an individual by replacing specialized cells which die due to normal wear and tear, or injury, with new healthy specialized cells. This remarkable regenerative capability means that adult stem cells could be used to better understand normal development and healing, test new pharmaceuticals, learn about aging, gain knowledge about certain cancers, and even develop new therapies which could improve human health and wellbeing. However, the development of new stem cell based applications is hampered because researchers do not have adequate quantities of stem cells with which to work. Their very low frequency in adult tissues means they cannot simply be isolated in sufficient numbers for study. One way to address this problem would be to develop robust and efficient methods which encourage the small numbers of stem cells which can be isolated from a tissue, to repeatedly divide outside the body (i.e. when placed in culture), thereby resulting in huge numbers of cells which could be used by researchers to carry out their work. Conventional methods of growing cells in small culture dishes are manually intensive and inefficient, and not able to support the large scale production of stem cells in a reproducible manner. More recently, it has been shown that bioreactors, which are larger vessels in which the environment can be carefully monitored and controlled, can be used to support the efficient and reproducible growth of adult stem cells. The focus of the research program described here is to better understand adult stem cell behaviour in culture, and to use that information to engineer and optimize new methods and technologies which support their large scale production under controlled conditions in bioreactors. The cell populations generated as a result of this research program will facilitate the development of new and important adult stem cell applications.