In many ways, stem cells are an important part of the biological world. On the one hand, these natural shapeshifters can transform themselves into almost any type of cells in the body. In this regard, they promised to cure diseases ranging from spinal cord injury to cancer.
On the other hand, Sarah Hillshorn, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, said that stem cells are as easy to handle as smallpox.
We just don't know how to effectively cultivate a large number of stem cells and keep them regenerated, Hillshorn said. This has prevented us from making greater progress in creative treatment.
So far. In a recent paper published in Nature Materials, Heilshorn described a method to solve the dual challenge of cultivating and preserving neural stem cells while still maturing into many different cell types. The first challenge is that the growing number of stem cells needs space. Like traditional agriculture, this is a two-dimensional event. If you want more wheat, corn or stem cells, you need more surface area. Therefore, cultivating stem cells requires a lot of relatively expensive laboratory resources, not to mention extracting all the energy and nutrients needed.
The second challenge is that once they divide many times in a laboratory Petri dish, it is not easy for stem cells to remain in the ideal state of other types of cells. Researchers call this quality dryness. Hiles Horn found that for the neural stem cells she was studying, cell contact was needed to keep the cells dry.
Heilshorn's team is studying a specific type of stem cells that will mature into neurons and other cells in the nervous system. These types of cells, if produced in sufficient quantities, can produce therapies to repair spinal cord injury, resist traumatic brain injury or cure some of the most serious neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease.
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Heilshorn's solution includes using better materials to cultivate stem cells. Her laboratory has developed a new polymer gel that can make cells grow in three dimensions. This new 3-D process only takes up less than 1% of the laboratory space required by the current stem cell culture technology. Because the cells are very small, the three-dimensional gel pile is only one millimeter high and only one dime thick.
For 3D culture, we only need 4 by 4 inches of laboratory space, which is about 16 square inch. Chris Maadyr, the first author, is a recent graduate majoring in bioengineering in Heilshorn Laboratory. He said that two-dimensional culture needs a space of 4 feet by 4 feet, which is more than 65,438+000 times the space.
In addition to greatly saving laboratory space, the new process also needs less nutrients and less energy.
The gel developed by the team enables stem cells to reshape long molecules and maintain physical contact with each other, thus retaining key communication channels between cells.
Simple contact behavior is the key to stem cells and maintaining stem cell communication. If stem cells cannot reshape the gel, they can't touch each other. Madl explained.
Heilshorn added: Without access to stem cells, they will not die completely, but they will lose their ability to regenerate, which is exactly what we need for successful treatment.
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