Over the last two decades the use of adult stem cells in therapy has gained significant momentum. However, stem cells are usually associated with high costs derived from extraction, expansion and storage. This is delaying their approval into clinical practice. By repurposing medical waste tissues for stem cell harvesting, there is an opportunity to extract valuable therapeutic material without incurring additional costs associated with procuring raw materials or handling waste disposal. Harvesting stem cells from discarded tissues is a non-invasive, safe procedure lowering healthcare costs associated with managing donor site complications. Given the dire need for stem cells in regenerative therapies, it is imperative we make advancements towards reducing the gap between the supply and the demand of such cells for therapy. We propose the innovative concept of “Upcycled mesenchymal Stem Cells (USCs)” to upcycle and repurpose adult mesenchymal stem cells from biowastes.
The saving banks of “umbilical cord blood stem cells” are considered as strategic health-based institutions in most countries. Due to the limited capacity of cord blood sample storage tanks, the samples should be evaluated according to their quality. So these banks need a method to assess quality. In this paper, first, the effective factors on the quality index of the extracted cord blood from newborn infants are identified using the electronic records and database of Royan’s umbilical cord blood bank. Then by machine learning and various statistical methods such as multilayer perceptron neural networks, radial basis function neural networks, logistic regression, and C4.5 decision tree, the quality value of blood samples and their proper category (for discarding or freezing) are determined. Two different sets of data have been used to evaluate the proposed methods. The results show that the ensemble of radial basis function neural network with k-means clustering model has the best accuracy compared to other methods, which categorizes the samples with 91.5% accuracy for the first data set and 81.6% accuracy for the second one. The results also show that using this method can save about $1 million annually.
The vascular endothelium serves an important function in many signaling processes and throughout all of our organs. Accurately mimicking its dynamic environment in vitro requires a wide range of flow control. We present a microfluidic chip fabricated from rapid prototyped molds with which we can automate medium refreshment and medium recirculation using an integrated peristaltic pump. This macro valve-based pump can reach flow rates up to ~30 μL/min and over 3 × 106 valve actuations. Finally, we show that endothelial cells can be cultured in the device for 96 hours under peristaltic flow and with automated medium refreshment.
To translate Organ-on-Chips (OoCs) from academic proof-of-concept into commercially available systems, automation of fluid handling is essential. Integrated valves allow parallelization and automation, which are valuable tools for multiplex in vitro cell culture systems. Here, we show the fabrication of two devices, containing 8 culture chambers or 4 OoCs, each consisting of a top and a bottom channel. We show that all chambers and channels are individually addressable by actuation of the integrated pneumatic valves. An initial cell culture experiment shows that the device is suitable for cell culture.
The local deposition of metal patterns on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-based microfluidic devices is usually obtained with methods based on photolithography and thin-film deposition techniques. As a result, it is time consuming and expensive. We present a cleanroom-free method to generate and locally (3D) print nanoparticles inside microfluidic structures using a prototype nanoparticle printer. Films of Pt or Ag nanoparticles were printed on a PDMS microfluidic device and used for two different applications: generation of pH gradients via bipolar electrochemistry, and localized sensing of chemicals via surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). The results show the versatility of the approach, allowing the integration of metal nanoparticles in specific regions of microfluidic devices for various applications.
