Body Building on Diamonds

Whereas conservative therapies aim to stall the advance of disease, regenerative medicine strives to reverse it. The capacity of most tissues to regenerate derives from stem cells, but there are a number of barriers which have to be circumvented before it will be possible to use stem-cell-based therapies. Such therapies, however, are expected to improve human health enormously, and knowledge gained from studying stem cells in culture and in model organisms is now laying the groundwork for a new era of regenerative medicine. One of the most prominent methods to study stem cell differentiation is to let them to form embryoid bodies. Under favourable conditions any stem cell line will form embryoid bodies. However, the mechanism of the formation of embryoid bodies is not very well understood, and to produce them in the laboratory is in no way trivial — an important technical barrier in stem cell research. Recently, the embryoid body cultivation step has been successfully circumvented for the derivation of osteogenic cultures of embryonic stem cells. Here we report on a simple and reusable system to cultivate embryoid bodies in extremely short times. The method is inspired by the principles that lead to the establishment of the biomimetic triangle.