Serum-Free Cell Culture: From Art to Science in 25 Years

Date: January 5, 1998

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With the prospect of huge profits from pharmaceuticals, serum-free tissue culture has been catapulted from a cottage industry to high technology

Think of serum-free media and an image comes to mind of a scientist sitting in front of a stack of tissue culture plates, painstakingly adding a little of this or a little of that to each plate in search of just the right combination. The motivation behind this activity varies-some scientists want to study the effects of hormones on target cells in vitro, and to do this, the media need to be hormone- and hence serum-free. Others want to understand how the growth of cells is regulated and are using serum stimulation of growth as a paradigm to gain this understanding. And still others just want to create reproducible and uncomplicated experimental culture systems, not dependent on...