Collaboration to Validate Osteogenic Cell Therapy

Plasticell and CellSpring are working together to develop tissue models using CellSprings’ 3D Bloom Biopolymercell culture system seeded with hMSCs that are subsequently differentiated to bone, cartilage and brown/white fat tissue using CombiCult-derived differentiation media. 3D cultures of cells were said to resemble natural tissues more closely compared to conventional 2D cultures and have more accurate biological responses to drug treatment, offering potential for identification of promising lead compounds in all stages of drug discovery.

Plasticell has used its proprietary Combinatorial Cell Culture™ (CombiCult®) platform to develop media for differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) to high quality osteocytes, chondrocytes and adipocytes (both white and brown), with a view to creating tissue models for drug screening and cell therapies. 

While Plasticell’s osteogenic media formulation has been licenced to MilliporeSigma for research use only (marketed as OsteoMAX-XF), Plasticell has retained rights to use the formulation and derivatives to develop therapeutic products, such as a cell-based therapy for repair of bone fractures. The global bone grafts and substitutes market is estimated to be $2.5bn per year and growing rapidly. 

“Testing Plasticell’s formulations in our system it became clear that impressive 3D bone structures were being formed,’ said Dr Chris Millan, co-founder and CTO of CellSpring. “After only a few days in culture we saw upregulation of osteogenic markers and morphological changes. The bone structures became white and opaque, whereas normally microtissues remain quite transparent to the naked eye, and after staining with Alizarin red we were barely able to transmit light through them in order to image the cells - this is something we have never seen before using our system.”