I have compiled a list of our most popular Cool Tools Features for 2016. Here are the top 15 in alphabetical order.

Cool Tool – A Complete Media System for Transient Transfection in CHO Cells

Transient protein production enables quick and efficient production of milligram to gram quantities of recombinant protein, which saves time and cost compared to developing a genetically stable cell line for use in bioproduction. This is particularly important in drug development, where timelines are short and only a relatively small amount of material is required. While CHO cells were not historically used in transient transfection systems, due to low bioproduct expression levels as compared to HEK293 systems, it was widely recognized that the ability to produce transient CHO-derived proteins during drug development would be very beneficial. Using CHO cells rather than other cell lines would reduce potential changes in protein function and/or quality between early research material and clinical or commercial product. Due to recent advances in transient transfection CHO systems, protein expression levels have increased to make CHO cells an attractive option for transient protein expression…

Cool Tool – An Optimized, Chemically-Defined, Animal Component-Free Neural Basal Medium

Neural progenitor cells (NPCs) derived from primary tissue and pluripotent stem cells have proven to be a powerful tool for gaining insight into the human nervous system as well as associated disease states. Impaired neurons and other differentiated cells that endogenously arise from NPCs are associated with many of the most challenging neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease. These differentiated neural cells serve as useful tools for modeling such diseases and provide a platform for the screening of potential drug therapies. In addition, researchers are just beginning to look into their direct use toward Cell Therapy applications where it may be possible to replace damaged or diseased neurons with healthy ones…

Cool Tool – A Xeno-free Culture System for hMSC Isolation and Expansion

Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC) are an important tool in regenerative medicine and cell therapies, as they have many attractive cellular characteristics. hMSCs present many advantages for therapeutic applications because they can be sourced from a wide range of tissue sources, are immune-privileged, and are able to migrate to tumors and wounds in vivo. Today hMSCs are one of the most common stem cell types found in Cell Therapy clinical trials…

Cool Tools – BrainPhys™: A New Way to Culture Neurons

Abnormal or diminished neuronal function is one of the hallmarks of many neurological disorders, including schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, autism spectrum disorders and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).¹ For researchers who model these diseases in vitro, it’s essential to use a culture system that supports neuronal functions, including spontaneous electrical activity and evoked action potential firing. Now, with the invention of BrainPhys™,² researchers can choose a neuronal basal medium designed to promote optimal culture conditions for primary rodent or human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived neurons…

Cool Tool – Cell Culture Basics Virtual Lab

The virtual lab is designed to allow you to practice several cell culture activities virtually. In my experimenting with the program, I was able to culture fibroblast cells. The program walked me through each step of the process and provided additional pop up information and quizzes to test what I had learned. At the completion of my successful culturing, I received a badge and had the opportunity to try a new task…

Cool Tool – ClinEss® – A tissue preservation and transportation medium provides protection of cells and allows for tissue to be stabilized without fixation

Human clinical samples are used to advance science to create new diagnostics and therapies. Analysis of clinical samples often requires the transport of tissue samples to various locations. For instance, tissue samples must be shipped from the surgical removal site to the research lab. Preserving tissue during transport is most commonly accomplished via chemical fixation (i.e. in formalin) or flash freezing to control for tissue degradation. Flash freezing is often chosen to preserve protein activity/accessibility, since chemical fixation typically involves permanent non-specific cross-linking, which removes many options for protein use. The choice to use flash freezing can still have a significant impact on transportation, requiring the use of liquid nitrogen or dry ice. Once difficult transportation issues are resolved, there are still confounding factors caused by ice crystal formation. Formalin fixation introduces its own difficulties in that (1) the cells cannot later be cultured and (2) extraction of kb size fragments of DNA or RNA for sequencing can be problematic…

Cool Tool – Kits to Simplify and Standardize Your Immune Cell Cultures

One challenging, but addressable, aspect of culturing immune cells is the lack of standardized protocols for their differentiation and expansion. Most labs rely on literature searches to craft protocols, but are often faced with conflicting advice. These variations in cell culture expansion and differentiation can cause unreliable results. The variations are frequently attributed to the cytokines used and the timing for adding differentiating agents. Inconsistencies can impact researchers’ ability to accurately interpret the data within their own experiments and can make replicating the experiment impossible for others. This variability can also negatively impact the use of these cells in Cell Therapy applications…

Cool Tool – Mitigating Risk beyond Xeno-Free: Virus Stabilization during Culture and Final Formulation

Previously, we demonstrated the critical importance of the animal component free recombinant human serum albumin product Cellastim in the expansion of cells relevant in virus production for vaccines using cell lines VERO and MRC-5. The expansion capability of media formulations completely void of any human serum or animal serum components was greatly enhanced by the addition of Cellastim. With further optimization, these animal component free (ACF) media performed equivalently to 10% FBS-containing medium in plates, flasks, and 150 mL spinners. Taken together, addition of Cellastim can greatly enhance the performance of serum free media…

Cool Tool – Novel universal titer boost and enhancer improves CHO cell protein production in small bioreactors

Historically, reagents that provided lipid supplements have had varying success on optimizing cell culture media and there have been issues reported in the literature around the use of certain lipids with certain plastics (1). With the increase in single-use systems, there is more plastic overall in the biomanufacturing process and so, the use of lipids as supplements would seem to be more challenging as a result. In one of the studies presented in the poster, Essential Pharmaceuticals used their universal titer boost and enhancer, Cell-Ess, to improve protein production in CHO cells using a 5 liter WAVE Bioreactor as the manufacturing vessel. The WAVE Bioreactor has been shown to prove scalability to larger vessels. Cell-Ess was able to achieve a greater than 25% increase in protein production using their supplement in this system. This would indicate that there is indeed an opportunity for a lipid enhanced media to work within a plastic environment…

Cool Tool – New Robust Kit for Efficient Generation of Functional Pancreatic Progenitor Cells

Human embryonic stem (ES) or induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are powerful tools for studying developmental biology, disease modeling, and regenerative and personalized medicine. The ability to direct differentiation of human ES and iPS cells to the pancreatic lineage has introduced significant opportunities for pancreatic and diabetes research; however, generating pancreatic progenitor cells is a challenging and labor-intensive process that can be highly variable across pluripotent cell lines. The new STEMdiff™ Pancreatic Progenitor Kit is a convenient, easy-to-use and high-performance alternative; this kit efficiently and reproducibly generates functional pancreatic progenitor cells from multiple human ES and iPS cell lines. The resulting cells are capable of in vitro or in vivo maturation to both endocrine and exocrine pancreatic cell lineages…

Cool Tool – Off the Shelf Optimized CHO Media and Feed

CHO media and feed strategies are critical in the creation of a biomanufacturing process that yields good productivity, hits tight project timelines and meets specified protein quality requirements. CHO media and feed development, including raw material sourcing, product timelines and impact of media on product characteristics present a complex problem that companies must address in order to move their process and product to commercial manufacturing…

Cool Tool – Online Cell Culture Media Formulation Tool

Finding the right combination of cell culture media ingredients can be tricky and it isn’t always simple to find an off the shelf medium that meets all your requirements. Sometimes it takes several clicks around to locate one that will meet your needs…

Cool Tool – Producing 3D Tissue Models of the Airway Epithelium with PneumaCult™

There is a growing need for physiologically relevant models of the human airway epithelium, but recreating these complex functions in vitro is a considerable challenge. To appropriately model the in vivo human airway, specialized media and cell culture techniques have been developed that promote the formation of 3D structures that recapitulate the morphological and functional characteristics of the airway…

Cool Tool – SCOUT® technology reduces time to market and increases chance of success for biopharmaceutical products

Only 1 out of each 50 biopharmaceutical new product candidates makes it through the research phase into clinical trial testing and subsequently to the market. This high attrition rate is predominantly in the early development phases and is attributed to (I) undesired pharmacokinetics profile (39%), (II) lack of efficacy (30%), (III) in vivo toxicity in preclinical model (11%), (IV) adverse effect in humans (10%), and (V) other reasons, of which most commonly commercial arguments based on cost of goods (10%). It is therefore imperative that technologies become available that allow significant de-risking of biopharmaceutical product trajectories in the early research and development phase. The importance of this has been recognized by the field with the introduction of the “Design of Experiments” (DoE) approach, identifying critical quality attributes and performance attributes like yield, glycosylation, potency, and consumable costs of a manufacturing process. Owing to the DoE approach, scientists now have a tool to strategize the development of a novel product candidate. That said, it is often found that due to the complexity of many novel molecules, the number of parameters that need to be tested still requires vast numbers of experiments which are time consuming and costly…

Cool Tool –Smart Cell Culture Monitoring, Transform single cell parameters into cell culture intelligence

Current cell culture monitoring typically involves manual sampling from each bioreactor being monitored, at least once per day, ideally more often. The sample is then prepared and cells are counted. An operator must then enter the results into a spreadsheet or other tracking software and generate a growth curve. After the growth curve is generated, an operator can then adjust culture controls accordingly. The challenge with this process is that it is highly manual, cumbersome and time consuming. Sampling an entire facility means a whole team is required to monitor what can be upwards of 50+ bioreactors. In addition, manual sampling creates an opportunity for contamination and variability. Sampling must also occur daily, which means that weekend work is required…