Bone Marrow-Derived Human Mesenchymal Stem Cell Production In HYPERStack® 36-layer Cell Culture Vessels

By Hilary Sherman and John Shyu, Corning Incorporated, Life Sciences

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are multipotent cells that have recently generated significant interest for cellular therapy applications. MSCs have the potential to differentiate into other mesenchymal tissue lineages such as adipocytes, osteocytes, and chondrocytes¹. Additionally, they are known to secrete trophic factors that can play an important role in immunoregulation¹. Although MSCs can be isolated from different tissue sources, bone marrow-derived MSCs are commonly studied due to their ease of access and achievable therapeutic dosage (2 x 10⁶ cells/kb of body weight)^2,3. Here, we demonstrate the utility of the Corning HYPERStack 36-layer cell culture vessel as a tool to meet the growing demand for expanding bone marrow-derived MSCs to relevant scale for clinical application workflows. The utilization of gas permeable film technology provided in the spatial footprint of a traditional stacked cell culture vessel enables Corning HYPERStack cell culture vessels to provide up to 5X the surface area in the same spatial footprint for expansion of adherent cell types, such as MSCs. Our results show that over 870 million human bone marrow-derived MSCs can be obtained from a single HYPERStack 36-layer cell culture vessel. Furthermore,  harvested cells demonstrated high viability and expressed characteristic surface markers of human bone marrow-derived MSC identity.