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.