INTERACT – High throughput expansion of stem cells in micro-scaffolds for cell therapy

Stem cell-based therapies raises hope to cure a wide range of incurable diseases. With the current cell culture techniques (Petri dishes/flasks and stirred bioreactors), stem cell production faces bottlenecks: limited throughput, labor-intensive, leading to high costs (10-40 k€ per dose). These limitations hamper the development of stem cell therapies and regenerative medicine, however revolutionary they are. We recently showed, in collaboration with Saint Louis Hospital, that chitosan/collagen micro-scaffolds, obtained by microfluidics, amplify mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) with large densities, high quality, and they have a potential to considerably reduce their production costs. Along this work, we discovered different morphologies of growth, spheroids and elongated, depending on the pore size. Here we focus on exploring and optimizing the performances of our micro-scaffolds regarding stem cell production, the goal being to cut MSC production cost by a factor of ten. A startup creation is envisioned.