Animal Cell Technology Unit review paper has been included in a Trends Limited Edition focusing on reviews in Technological Advances

The recently published review co-authored by Margarida Serra, Catarina Brito, Cláudia Correia and Paula M. Alves from the Animal Cell Technology Unit (ACTU - ITQB and iBET), has been selected and included in a Trends Limited Edition focusing on reviews in Technological Advances. Stem cells (SCs), with their ability for extensive proliferation and multi-lineage differentiation, can serve as a renewable source of cellular material in regenerative medicine and toxicology. A pre-requisite for the transition of SCs or their progeny to these fields is the establishment of efficient cell culture protocols for large-scale expansion, differentiation, storage and distribution. The major challenges in producing SC-derivatives are the scaling up of reproducible pure cell populations of undifferentiated cells without compromising their self-renewal ability and differentiation potential and the directed differentiation to specific cell types with improved differentiation efficiency, high purity and cell functionality. In this review the authors describe how human pluripotent stem cell (hPSCs), including embryonic and induced pluripotent cells constitute an extremely attractive tool for cell therapy and the latest advances in hPSCs process engineering, underlining why this is one of the main focusing areas of the ACTU.