Neural Stem Cells: Bioprocess Engineering

The discovery of neural stem cells in the adult mammalian brain has created new hope that progressive and currently incurable neurodegenerative conditions, such as Parkinson's disease, can be effectively treated using transplantation-based cell therapies. Unfortunately, the sparse nature of stem cells in mammalian tissues prevents them from being isolated in the quantities needed to efficiently develop such therapies. Standard culture methods combined with scalable bioprocesses to expand significantly isolated stem cell populations would allow this bottleneck to be eliminated. Moreover, access to large numbers of neural stem cells would not only enable the development of new stem cell-based therapies, but would also subsequently facilitate the widespread clinical implementation of such treatments. In order to address the issue of stem cell scarcity, we have conducted extensive research at the Pharmaceutical Production Research Facility (PPRF) in Calgary related to the scale-up of neural stem cell production. In this article, we present firstly the properties and applications of mammalian neural stem cells, and then review the bioprocess engineering research that has been carried out at PPRF. Our work has resulted in the successful development of a robust bioreactor technology platform to efficiently and reproducibly generate clinical quantities of mammalian neural stem cells. Keywords: bioreactors; bioprocessing; cell aggregates; growth media; mammalian neural stem cells; process control; scale-up

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