Novel Bioreactor Platform for Scalable Cardiomyogenic Differentiation from Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Embryoid Bodies.

Abstract

Generation of cardiomyocytes from pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) is a common and valuable approach to produce large amount of cells for various applications, including assays and models for drug development, cell-based therapies, and tissue engineering. All these applications would benefit from a reliable bioreactor-based methodology to consistently generate homogenous PSC-derived embryoid bodies (EBs) at a large scale, which can further undergo cardiomyogenic differentiation. The goal of this chapter is to describe a scalable method to consistently generate large amount of homogeneous and synchronized EBs from PSCs. This method utilizes a slow-turning lateral vessel bioreactor to direct the EB formation and their subsequent cardiomyogenic lineage differentiation.