Scalable Culturing of Primary Human Glioblastoma Tumor- Initiating Cells with a Cell-Friendly Culture System

Authors

Qiang Li, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Haishuang Li, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Jack Rauch, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Loic P. Deleyrolle, University of Florida
Brent A. Reynolds, University of FloridaFollow
Hendrik J. Viljoen, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Chi Zhang, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Linxia Gu, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Erika Van Wyk, CellGro Technologies, LLC
Yuguo Lei, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2018

Document Type

Article

Citation

SCIENTIFIC REPORTS | (2018) 8:3531

Comments

© The Author(s) 2018

Open access

DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-21927-4

Abstract

Glioblastoma is the most aggressive and deadly brain cancer. There is growing interest to develop drugs that specifically target to glioblastoma tumor-initiating cells (TICs). However, the cost-effective production of large numbers of high quality glioblastoma TICs for drug discovery with current cell culturing technologies remains very challenging. Here, we report a new method that cultures glioblastoma TICs in microscale alginate hydrogel tubes (or AlgTubes). The AlgTubes allowed long-term culturing (~50 days, 10 passages) of glioblastoma TICs with high growth rate (~700-fold expansion/14 days), high cell viability and high volumetric yield (~3.0 × 10⁸ cells/mL) without losing the stem cell properties, all offered large advancements over current culturing methods. This method can be applied for the scalable production of glioblastoma TICs at affordable cost for drug discovery.