A Novel Strategy for the Expansion of Peripheral Blood Stem Cells in Autologous

Stem Cells are now the favorite cells used for cell therapy in many disease conditions including spinal cord injury, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and several other problems. They are also a standard of care in the treatment of some selected patients with cancer after high-dose chemotherapy (HDC). This is because of their potential to repair and regenerate damaged cells, tissues and organ. The bottle neck to the clinical application of Peripheral Blood Stem Cells (PBSCs) has been the low level of the concentration recovered after apheresis that is mostly insufficient to produce therapeutic efficacy. Ex vivo expansion of PBSC is a logical step to overcome such problem, but current efforts in this direction are still inefficient. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the efficacy of scaling up of PBSC in manipulated autologous serum coupled with the synergistic action of hematopoietic growth factors (HGFs) in the presence of stromal cell derived factor. We derived PDGF from autologous serum using cellaid protocol, then supplement the serum with interleukin 3 (IL-3), interleukin 6 (IL-6), stem cell factor (SCF), granulocytes colony stimulating factor (G-CSF), megakaryocytes growth and differentiation factor (MGDF) and stromal cell derived factor (SCDF) Our result indicates that bench scale expansion of PBSC is possible in autologous serum. To translate this success into the clinic, the cells need to be expanded in a large scale. Here we describe a proposed design for automation ex vivo that will allow our expansion protocol to be translated into machine/device manipulation to allow for routine clinical application that favors good manufacturing practice