I am having trouble maintaining my human neural stem cells in an undifferentiated state. Do you think adding LIF would help?

Answer

There have been multiple publications on the addition of rhLIF to human neural stem cells in order to enhance NSC proliferation and viability. Therefore, I would recommend adding rhLIF to the medium to see if there is an improvement in the multipotency of your cultures. However, even though rhLIF may improve your cultures, you may have not addressed the core problem. There has been repeated reports of poor multipotency retention and reproducible cell performance in various lots of some of the more popular commercial supplements due to variations in preparation of serum-derived proteins. We have developed an animal component-free neural stem cell supplement that contains multiple ExpressTec-derived proteins. We have found that this novel supplement has competitive cell growth and viability to that of N-2 or B27 supplements and the popular EnStem media. If there is interest in more information for this supplement, contact ralfano@invitria.com.