Date of Graduation
5-2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering
Degree Level
Undergraduate
Department
Biomedical Engineering
Advisor/Mentor
Rao, Raj
Abstract
Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) are a promising candidate for cellular therapies due to their multipotency, self-renewal capacity, and immunomodulatory properties. However, their isolation is a difficult and potentially painful process with very low yield, and traditional static mammalian cell culture techniques are too slow and expensive for large scale growth and differentiation of stem cells to be practical. Current research is focused on improving methods for cultivating hMSCs in stirred suspension bioreactors (SSBs), but little work has been done with regard to their differentiation in dynamic conditions such as those in SSBs. Differentiation at a large scale would increase the amount of paracrine factors released that can potentially be isolated and purified for further use. The main goal of this research is to establish how effectively hMSCs differentiate into SMCs in stirred suspension bioreactor conditions. The initial findings suggest that the cells were successfully growing inside the bioreactor, but the differentiation results were inconclusive due to very low expression of the examined markers. Issues with the staining and flow cytometry procedures need to be fixed before more samples are tested.
Keywords
bioreactor, stem cell, differentiation, smooth muscle cell
Citation
Slavin, C. (2020). Stirred Suspension Bioreactor Differentiation of Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells into Smooth Muscle Cells. Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/bmeguht/89