Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
differentiation, and it is demonstrated that proliferation and cardiac
differentiation were significantly enhanced compared to the case
without microcarriers.
As described above, there are many technologies to scale
up ESC/iPSC culture for cardiac differentiation. To assess these
technologies, cost-effectiveness in preparing a requisite amount of
cardiomyocytes is one of the critical criteria. Although complicated
culture system and the use of expensive biochemical agents may
result in the high efficiency of cardiac differentiation, they also
may lead to a high cost. The cost-effectiveness is related to many
factors such as the apparent cost of materials, the necessary labor,
the efficiency of cardiac differentiation, and the robustness of the
culture system. The enrichment process of ESC-/iPSC-derived
cardiomyocytes is also closely related to the cost-effectiveness of
the whole culture system. If simple and low-cost purification of
ESC-/iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes will be possible, the efficiency of
cardiac differentiation will become less important. In the next part,
the recent technologies for the enrichment of ESC-/iPSC-derived
cardiomyocytes are briefly reviewed.
2c.4
Enrichment of Cardiomyocytes
There are two methodologies to enrich a certain type of cells from
a population of various types of cells. One is the positive selection
of desired cells, and the other is negative selection to remove
undesired cells. The most popular method for cell enrichment is
positive selection by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) or
magnetic-activated cell sorting (MACS) by targeting the specific
surface antigens of desired cells. However, the specific surface
antigen of cardiomyocytes has not been identified. Therefore,
the development of methods to obtain clinically safe and highly
purified ESC-/iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes is still ongoing. The
minimum requirement for the clinical use of ESC-/iPSC-derived
cells is the absence of undifferentiated ESCs/iPSCs, which can form
teratomas when transplanted into the body. Even after prolonged
differentiation culture, it is usually difficult to completely eliminate
undifferentiated ESCs/iPSCs. Therefore, the negative selection of
undifferentiated ESCs/iPSCs is one of the valuable strategies to
