Integrated processes for expansion and differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells in suspended microcarriers cultures

Current methods for human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC) expansion and differentiation can be limited in scalability and costly (due to their labor intensive nature). This can limit their use in cell therapy, drug screening and toxicity assays. One of the approaches that can overcome these limitations is microcarrier (MC) based cultures in which cells are expanded as cell/MC aggregates and then directly differentiated as embryoid bodies (EBs) in the same agitated reactor. This integrated process can be scaled up and eliminate the need for some culture manipulation used in common monolayer and EBs cultures. This review describes the principles of such microcarriers based integrated hPSC expansion and differentiation process, and parameters that can affect its efficiency (such as MC type and extracellular matrix proteins coatings, cell/MC aggregates size, and agitation). Finally examples of integrated process for generation cardiomyocytes (CM) and neural progenitor cells (NPC) as well as challenges to be solved are described.