Cell biologist Alicia Lyle hoped to use mouse mesenchymal stem cells to deliver molecular cargos to tissues, and she also wanted to study how MSCs from different lines of knockout mice assemble into blood vessels. But Lyle’s group, at Emory University in Atlanta, soon hit a snag: growing the cells took ages.
“Even with the tenderest of care, it was taking somewhere close to eight to twelve weeks to even reach a point . . . to passage them,” recalls Lyle, referring to the point when cells crowd a dish and need to be split between multiple culture flasks. And by passage seven or eight, Lyle’s cells began to senesce, losing their ability to either maintain pluripotency or differentiate.
While mouse MSCs are particularly difficult to work with, Lyle’s complaints echo those heard across the stem cell field. To both understand stem cells and use them to treat diseases, efficiency ...
