#FridayRead

Lukasz Truszkowski, Sveva Bottini, Sara Bianchi, Silvia Becca, Giulia Savorè, Kirsten E Snijders, Federica Sozza, Cristina Rubinetto, Elisa Balmas and Alessandro Bertero from HEDGe, University of Turin. Helen Bell, Luana Ferrara and Catherine Elton from Qkine, Cambridge, UK.

To start off the New Year, this week’s #FridayRead is from a lab close to our hearts. In collaboration with Qkine the team in Alessandro Bertero’s lab at the University of Turin have developed optimized media for the maintenance of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs).

Cell therapy is becoming a possibility for many previously untreatable conditions, and it should be accessible to everyone. Creating a cost-effective, reliable and reproducible way of culturing hiPSCs in a range of research labs, and allowing large scale culture for gene-editing purposes takes us one step closer to this.

By using high potency thermostable Qkine 145 amino acid FGF-G3 (Qk052) reduced FGF-2 use in media by 8-fold and weekend-free culture reduced media use by 57%.

This makes hiPSCs a more accessible model for many labs doing basic and translational research!