HSCexpand
Hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSC) from umbilical cord blood (UCB) present several advantages compared to adult sources including higher proliferative capacity; abundant availability and ease of collection; non-risk and painless harvesting procedure; and lower risk of Graft versus Host Disease. However, the therapeutic utility of UCB HSC has been limited to patients with less than 45kg due to their low frequency per unit of UCB and difficulty to propagate in vitro Therefore, improved isolation, purification and ex-vivo expansion HSC will enormously boost of all current and future medical uses of these cells.
In this work a prototype of a packed-bed reactor (PBR) will be developed for the scale-up the UCB HSC co-culture with mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) as feeder cells, able to recapitulate the hematopoietic niche. This system will allow the ex-vivo production of HSC under highly controlled culture conditions, namely concerning nutrient/metabolite and growth factors/cytokine concentrations and oxygen levels.
Project webpage Start year 01/04/2016 End year 31/03/2019 ID PTDC/QEQ-EPR/6623/2014 iBB Role Coordinator iBB Budget 100 200,00 € Research Group SCERG PI Ana Fernandes Project Partners n.a Status Completed Funding FCT