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The tabula rasa of cells

Nature Biotechnology volume 24, page 303 (2006)Cite this article

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The first cells were derived with a medium containing mouse fibroblasts, “which is kind of a standard tissue culture that you use when you don't know what you're doing,” explains Thomson, “because they secrete a lot of stuff. Then over the years, we've found that the things that do support mouse ES cells don't support hES cells.” Pera says hES cell culture has progressed on many fronts, particularly “refining the culture system to make it easier to expand the cells and defining the medium to eliminate animal products.” The remaining challenges, he says, are scaling up the culture and creating reliable techniques to grow up an entire culture from a single ES cell. Already, Pera says, many promising culture methodologies have been described; now they need to be assessed by multiple research groups. In January of this year, Thomson's group described the first fully defined xeno-free medium for culturing human stem cells and isolated two cell lines derived in fully defined medium, though both lines had chromosomal abnormalities3.

But Thomson thinks that the major barriers for culturing hES cells have already been overcome. “There will be improvements,” he says, “but it will be kind of diminishing returns from now on.” In particular, the twin specters of genetic instability and tumorigenicity will be mastered, though not exorcised, through better technique, says Thomson, who was part of the team that first described the emergence of chromosoma abnormalities in cultured hES cells4. “If you're really careful with the culture conditions, the cells are quite stable. It's a concern that has to be managed,” he adds, “but it is ultimately manageable.”

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References

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The tabula rasa of cells. Nat Biotechnol 24, 303 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0306-303a

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