Following a recent peer-reviewed publication describing C-Stem™ – a high-throughput cell encapsulation technology allowing for the massive expansion of pluripotent stem cells in stirred-tank bioreactors, Maxime Feyeux, PhD, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of TreeFrog Therapeutics, comes back on the benefits of the capsule.
Transcript:
One other question that we have is that like putting a capsule is an extra step.
Why do you need it ? That’s actually absolutely necessary because you need to recapitulate a niche, that’s the way you get that shape and you need to protect that niche. So if you want to go up and scale – and that’s basically what you want to do if you go for a therapeutic product – you want to be able to put your cells into a bioreactor for example. And a bioreactor automatically means shear stress. And those cells – the pluripotent stem cells – are not at all adapted to be resilient to that, because in vivo they are protected by the surrounding tissues. So the capsule acts as a means to protect the cells from the shear stress and also to control the size so that all cells in the bioreactor get the same exact conditions and thus get the same exact fate.