Credit: Salk Institute
Researchers say they’ve discovered an easy way to collect large quantities of viable, bankable stem cells.
Donors prick their own fingers to provide a single drop of blood, and the team generates induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from that sample.
“We show that a single drop of blood from a finger-prick sample is sufficient for performing cellular reprogramming, DNA sequencing, and blood typing in parallel,” said Jonathan Yuin-Han Loh, PhD, of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore.
“Our strategy has the potential of facilitating the development of large-scale human iPSC banking worldwide.”
The researchers described this strategy in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine.
“We gradually reduced the starting volume of blood (collected using a needle) and confirmed that reprogramming can be achieved with as little as 0.25 milliliters,” said Hong Kee Tan, a research officer in the Loh lab.
And this made the team wonder whether a do-it-yourself approach to blood collection might work too.
“To test this idea, we asked donors to prick their own fingers in a normal room environment and collect a single drop of blood sample into a tube,” Tan said. “The tube was placed on ice and delivered to the lab for reprogramming.”
The cells were treated with a buffer at 12-, 24- or 48-hour increments and observed under the microscope for viability and signs of contamination. After 12 days of expansion in medium, the cells appeared healthy and were actively dividing.
The researchers then succeeded in forcing the cells to become mesodermal, endodermal, and neural cells. They were also able to produce cells that gave rise to rhythmically beating cardiomyocytes.
The team said there was no noticeable reduction in reprogramming efficiency between the freshly collected finger-prick samples and the do-it-yourself samples.
“[W]e derived healthy iPSCs from tiny volumes of venipuncture and a single drop from finger-prick blood samples,” Dr Loh said. “We also report a high reprogramming yield of 100 to 600 colonies per milliliter of blood.”
