A Novel Bioreactor System for Manufacturing in Stem Cell Therapy and Tissue Engineering

再生医学的出现为目前无法有效治疗的疾病和损伤提供了新的治疗方法和程序。再生医学涉及使用活细胞和其他生物分子来恢复人体器官和组织中受损的结构和功能。此外，最近干细胞的发现和潜在用途带来的兴奋使得研究干细胞研究如何用于治疗患者是及时的。关键问题之一是如何产生足够的活细胞(包括非常罕见的干细胞)，使其具有这些新疗法的正确功能。目前的实验室细胞培养程序效率不高，也不规范，不能满足当前的临床需求。该项目旨在通过开发一种有效培养干细胞和其他人类细胞的新方法来解决这一尖锐问题，以提供足够的治疗患者所需的细胞。这个系统将基于使用从海藻(藻酸盐)中提取的生物材料来培养细胞的想法，这种材料允许细胞正常生长和发育。在这项工作中，我们将决定培养系统的关键特征将对人类干细胞以及特定的人类细胞类型(如骨细胞)的生长和功能产生什么影响。作为我们实验的一部分，我们将测量细胞在不同培养环境中的生长和行为，并将其与传统方法进行比较。

The emergence of regenerative medicine offers the potential for new therapies and procedures for diseases and injuries that cannot currently be effectively treated. Regenerative medicine involves the use of living cells and other biological molecules to restore damaged structure and function in human organs and tissues. In addition, the recent excitement arising from the discovery and potential uses of stem cells makes it timely to investigate how stem cell research can be used to treat patients. One of the key issues is how to produce enough living cells (including the very rare stem cells) that have the correct function for these new therapies. The current laboratory cell culture procedures are not efficient, nor are they standardised and cannot meet the current clinical needs. This project aims to address this acute issue by the development of a new method of efficiently culturing stem cells and other human cells to give enough cells required to treat patients. This system will be based on the idea of growing cells using a biomaterial derived from seaweed (alginate) that allows the cells to grow and develop normally. In this work, we will decide what effects the key features of the culture system will have on the growth and function of both human stem cells, and also specific human cell types (eg bone cells). As part of our experiments we will measure how the cells grow and behave in the different culture environments, and compare this to conventional methods.