Human hematopoietic stem cells can survive in vitro for several months.
We previously reported that long-lasting in vitro hematopoiesis could be achieved using the cells differentiated from primate embryonic stem (ES) cells. Thus, we speculated that hematopoietic stem cells differentiated from ES cells could sustain long-lasting in vitro hematopoiesis. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether human hematopoietic stem cells could similarly sustain long-lasting in vitro hematopoiesis in the same culture system. Although the results varied between experiments, presumably due to differences in the quality of each hematopoietic stem cell sample, long-lasting in vitro hematopoiesis was observed to last up to nine months. Furthermore, an in vivo analysis in which cultured cells were transplanted into immunodeficient mice indicated that even after several months of culture, hematopoietic stem cells were still present in the cultured cells. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report to show that human hematopoietic stem cells can survive in vitro for several months.
Ishigaki
Taro
T
Cell Engineering Division, RIKEN BioResource Center, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0074, Japan.
Sudo
Kazuhiro
K
Hiroyama
Takashi
T
Miharada
Kenichi
K
Ninomiya
Haruhiko
H
Chiba
Shigeru
S
Nagasawa
Toshiro
T
Nakamura
Yukio
Y