Scale-up and Manufacturing of Cell-Based Therapies IV best student poster prize was awarded to Bárbara Cunha

The work entitled “Filtration methodologies for the concentration and washing of human mesenchymal stem cells” (authors: Bárbara Cunha, Tiago Aguiar, Marta M. Silva, Patrícia Gomes-Alves, Ricardo Silva, Cristina Peixoto, Margarida Serra, Manuel J.T. Carrondo, and Paula M. Alves) focuses on the development of a scalable integrated strategy for the concentration and washing of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC) using tangential flow filtration (TFF) technology. In the presented work, the authors describe the impact of several TFF’s process parameters (e.g. membrane material and pore size, shear rate, permeate flux) and two operation modes (continuous and discontinuous) on cells’ quality (i.e. cell morphology, viability, identity and potency) and recovery yield. Overall, this work showed that TFF is an efficient methodology for the concentration and washing of hMSC, which can be incorporated in the biomanufacturing workflow of cell-based therapies. Furthermore, the described process will have applicability for both autologous and allogeneic therapies, fulfilling the particular needs for both scale-up and scale-out. This work was supported by the NanoGene project (EuroNanoMed ERA-Net initiative: ENMED/0001/2010), and by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through the fellowship BD/51940/2012 (MIT-Portugal program) and project EXPL/BBB-EBI/1003/2012, which aims towards the development of a scalable strategy for stem cells purification. Scale-up and Manufacturing of Cell-Based Therapies IV took place from 19 to 22 of January at San Diego, California, USA. This conference aims to continue to play a central role in defining and refining the engineering sciences of cell-based therapies. This year, it focused mainly on process development, scale-up, and manufacturing of cell-based therapies and brought academicians, clinicians, industry leaders, and regulators from all over the world together to discuss the most critical scientific and engineering challenges in this field. Follow this link to learn more about this work!