Soft substrate maintains proliferative and adipogenic differentiation potential of human mesenchymal stem cells on long-term expansion by delaying senescence

Abhijit Majumder Research Group

Application of stem cells in the field of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering is one of the most trending prospects. However, getting higher number of functional stem cells to begin with is a bottleneck. The general procedure of stem cell isolation involves extraction from tissues such as bone marrow, dental pulp, adipose tissue, umbilical cord, etc. However, the proportion of stem cells is very low in any given tissue, thus their in-vitro expansion is essential. When cultured extensively in-vitro, stem cells lose their potency and become senescent making them unusable for any therapeutic application. In this work we have demonstrated that a soft substrate maintains stem cells in their native state over a long time and help them to grow faster as compared to the traditional cell culture system (Tissue culture plastic). Using the given gel of optimized stiffness one can easily generate huge number of functional stem cells for therapeutic application.

Publication details: Sanjay Kumar Kureel, Pankaj Mogha, Akshada Khadpekar, Vardhman Kumar, Rohit Joshi, Siddhartha Das, Jayesh Bellare, and Abhijit Majumder. 2019. "Soft substrate maintains proliferative and adipogenic differentiation potential of human mesenchymal stem cells on long-term expansion by delaying senescence". Biology Open. 8.

https://bio.biologists.org/content/8/4/bio039453

Acknowledgement

Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance (Project # IA/E/11/1/500419)
Seed grant from IITB (Grant # 14IRCCSG002) and core grants from the Dept of Biotechnology to inStem.
Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Scott & White through a grant from NCRR of the NIH, grant # P40RR017447.
IRCC, IIT Bombay Bio-AFM and confocal microscopy facility.
Dr James P Butler (Harvard Medical School, Department of Medicine, Boston)