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Dr. Cynthia Bamdad, CEO and Founder of Minerva Biotechnologies, will be presenting a poster at the 10yrs of iPSCs Symposium in Berkeley, CA September 25-27, 2016.
Poster #1.31: Novel stem cell growth factor NME7AB dramatically improves iPSC generation, expansion and differentiation
Despite the 10 years that have passed since the Nobel Prize winning discovery of iPSCs, their generation and expansion are still routinely done in bFGF-based media on feeder cells or extracellular matrix substrates. These methods are inefficient, labor-intensive and relatively non-scalable.
Minerva Biotechnologies has discovered a growth factor NME7AB that is expressed in the inner cell mass of human blastocysts. iPSC generation using the Yamanaka factors in serum-free, FGF-free, NME7AB media over an antibody adhesion layer increased feeder-free reprogramming efficiency by 1-2 orders of magnitude.
The NME7AB system enables single cell passaging and large-scale expansion in high-capacity flasks: 10-fold expansion in four days. Resultant cells express pluripotency markers, as well as naïve markers, have two active X chromosomes if generated from female cells and differentiate down all three germlines. Directed differentiation is superior to that of FGF grown cells in terms of quality, quantity and purity with no clonal differentiation bias.
About the 10yrs of iPSCs Symposium
In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi reported the Nobel Prize winning discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in Cell. In the ten years that have passed since, iPSC technology has provided fundamental insights into our understanding of cell fate, mammalian development, and human disease. It has also spurred renewed interest in direct reprogramming across lineages, and this area too has flourished. Progress in understanding the biology of iPSCs and reprogramming has moved in parallel with work on clinical translation to apply the insights obtained, and the first iPSC-based clinical trials are already underway.
To mark the 10th anniversary of this landmark discovery, Cell Press is pleased to announce a symposium focused on iPSC research and applications.