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[Stemcell Technologies]
[Question and Answer Session]
[Dr. Sam Wadsworth - UBC James Hogg Research Centre]
[Air-Liquid Interface Culture for Respiratory Research]
My name is Sam Wadsworth.
I am a post-doctoral research fellow at the James Hogg Research Centre
at UBC in Vancouver, Canada,
and the major goal of my research
is to identify the molecular and cellular origins
of lung diseases such as asthma and COPD.
Well our lab is really focused on epithelial biology.
So we use varied culture techniques.
We do grow other cell types.
So we grow fibroblasts and smooth muscle cells.
But as far as the epithelial cells are concerned,
we use standard submerged culture techniques to proliferate the cells.
But we also use air-liquid interface cultures
to grow differentiated primary airway epithelial cells.
So many of our epithelial surfaces are exposed to air.
So our skin, the cornea of our eyes, and our airways
are all exposed to air in vivo.
And so air-liquid interface culture is really just a way to recapitulate
this physiological environment in the lab.
And so what we use is a semipermeable membrane,
and we seed cells onto that membrane.
Now what that allows us to do is to expose the upper surface
of those epithelial cells to air
whilst growth factors and hormones can diffuse through
from a liquid media below to those cells to keep them alive.
Hence we have an air-liquid interface.
There are many different types of epithelial cells which are exposed to air.
So we can use ALI cultures to grow skin cells, corneal cells,
even intestinal cells.
We're interested in airway epithelial cells.
So ALI culture allows us to grow airway epithelium
in a much more physiologically relevant environment.
And what that does is it triggers the differentiation of those airway cells
into a specialized mucociliated tissue.
So airway epithelial cells grown as an ALI
differentiate into mucus-producing and ciliated cells.
Now what that allows us to do is not just have a more accurate model
of the airway epithelium in vitro,
but it also allows us to use much more physiologically relevant
experiments in our research.
So we can apply things like cigarette smoke, nebulized drugs, particulate matter
all in an airborne manner onto the apical surfaces of those ALI cultures.
We use PneumaCult™-ALI for several reasons.
One is that primary bronchial epithelial cells
are expensive and difficult to obtain,
and they only grow for a very limited lifespan.
So we need a culture medium that really gives us a consistent
and reliable performance in air-liquid interface culture.
These ALI cultures take several weeks to develop,
and so we need a media that really gives us, like I said,
a reliable performance.
We also need a media that gives us a consistently improved morphology
and function of differentiated airway epithelial cultures,
and we feel that this is what PneumaCult™-ALI can offer.
[Stemcell™ Technologies]
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