Large-scale cell production of stem cells for clinical application using the automated cell processing machine.
BACKGROUND
Cell-based regeneration therapies have great potential for application in new areas in clinical medicine, although some obstacles still remain to be overcome for a wide range of clinical applications. One major impediment is the difficulty in large-scale production of cells of interest with reproducibility. Current protocols of cell therapy require a time-consuming and laborious manual process. To solve this problem, we focused on the robotics of an automated and high-throughput cell culture system. Automated robotic cultivation of stem or progenitor cells in clinical trials has not been reported till date. The system AutoCulture used in this study can automatically replace the culture medium, centrifuge cells, split cells, and take photographs for morphological assessment. We examined the feasibility of this system in a clinical setting.


RESULTS
We observed similar characteristics by both the culture methods in terms of the growth rate, gene expression profile, cell surface profile by fluorescence-activated cell sorting, surface glycan profile, and genomic DNA stability. These results indicate that AutoCulture is a feasible method for the cultivation of human cells for regenerative medicine.


CONCLUSIONS
An automated cell-processing machine will play important roles in cell therapy and have widespread use from application in multicenter trials to provision of off-the-shelf cell products.
Daisuke
D
Kami
Keizo
K
Watakabe
Mayu
M
Yamazaki-Inoue
Kahori
K
Minami
Tomoya
T
Kitani
Yoko
Y
Itakura
Masashi
M
Toyoda
Takashi
T
Sakurai
Akihiro
A
Umezawa
Department of Regenerative Medicine, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, 465 Kajii-cho, Kawaramachi-Hirokoji, Kamigyo-ku, Kyoto 602-8566, Japan. gojos@koto.kpu-m.ac.jp.
Satoshi
S
Gojo
D000368:Aged; D057205:Automation, Laboratory; D018929:Cell Culture Techniques / Q000379:methods*; D064987:Cell- and Tissue-Based Therapy; D055028:Comparative Genomic Hybridization; D005434:Flow Cytometry; D006325:Heart Atria / Q000166:cytology; D006801:Humans; D008565:Membrane Proteins / Q000737:chemistry; D011134:Polysaccharides / Q000737:chemistry; D040081:Protein Array Analysis; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012371:Robotics; D013234:Stem Cells / Q000166:cytology*; D059467:Transcriptome
D008565:Membrane Proteins; D011134:Polysaccharides