BioE Seminar: Scalable, Dissolvable and Cell-Friendly Microenvironments for Stem Cell Manufacturing

Abstract: Clinical outcomes of cell therapies and regenerative medicine have shown their potential in treating many diseases and the cell therapy global market is projected to grow at 36.52% yearly to reach $400 billion in 2020. However, a key impediment to their widespread use and meeting their market expectations is the difficulty to manufacture cells at large scale and with high quality and affordable cost. Current cell manufacturing methods have low productivity and high production cost. Current cell culture technologies provide a cell culture environment that is not physiologically optimal and there exist significant product safety and quality concerns. Current cell production is labor-intensive, prone to large variations in product outcomes, susceptible to contamination and requires expensive clean rooms. There is a critical need for novel technologies that enable scalable (scale out and scale up) culturing of affordable, safe and potent human cells.