Expansion of human mesenchymal stem cells in fibrous bed bioreactor

Expansion of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) in bioreactor while preserving their innate properties is important in translation of hMSC-based therapy to clinical applications. The present study investigates the feasibility of hMSC expansion in a 2.5 L CelliGen® 310 Bioreactor packed with Fibra-Cel® disks. After 9 days of expansion, a 9.2-fold increase in cell number with the population doubling (PD) time of 2.8 days (67.2 h) was achieved and that the specific glucose consumption and lactate production were measured to be 12.48 pmol/cell/day and 20.95 pmol/cell/day, respectively. hMSCs harvested from the bioreactor maintained their properties based on the analysis of phenotypic surface markers, colony forming unit-fibroblasts (CFU-F) number, and multilineage differentiation ability. The results demonstrate the feasibility and the potential of the fibrous bed bioreactor for large scale hMSC expansion.