Engineered Microenvironment for Manufacturing Human Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells

Haishuang Lin
Xuefeng Qiu
Qian Du
Qiang Li
Ou Wang
Leonard Akert
Zhanqi Wang
Dirk Anderson
Kan Liu
Linxia Gu
Chi Zhang
Yuguo Lei

Open link

Publication date

January 2019

DOI

10.1016/j.stemcr.2018.11.009

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Journal

Stem Cell Reports

Abstract

Summary: Human pluripotent stem cell-derived vascular smooth muscle cells (hPSC-VSMCs) are of great value for disease modeling, drug screening, cell therapies, and tissue engineering. However, producing a high quantity of hPSC-VSMCs with current cell culture technologies remains very challenging. Here, we report a scalable method for manufacturing hPSC-VSMCs in alginate hydrogel microtubes (i.e., AlgTubes), which protect cells from hydrodynamic stresses and limit cell mass to <400 μm to ensure efficient mass transport. The tubes provide cells a friendly microenvironment, leading to extremely high culture efficiency. We have shown that hPSC-VSMCs can be generated in 10 days with high viability, high purity, and high yield (∼5.0 × 108 cells/m...