C.L. da Silva

Nonviral Gene Delivery to Mesenchymal Stem Cells Using Cationic Liposomes for Gene and Cell Therapy

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) hold a great promise for application in several therapies due to their unique biological characteristics. In order to harness their full potential in cell-or gene-based therapies it might be advantageous to enhance some of their features through gene delivery strategies. Accordingly, we are interested in developing an efficient and safe methodology to genetically engineer human bone marrow MSC (BM MSC), enhancing their therapeutic efficacy in Regenerative Medicine. The plasmid DNA delivery was optimized using a cationic liposome-based reagent. Transfection efficiencies ranged from ~2% to ~35%, resulting from using a Lipid/DNA ratio of 1.25 with a transgene expression of 7 days. Importantly, the number of plasmid copies in different cell passages was quantified for the first time and ~20,000 plasmid copies/cell were obtained independently of cell passage. As transfected MSC have shown high viabilities (>90%) and recoveries (>52%) while maintaining their multipotency, this might be an advantageous transfection strategy when the goal is to express a therapeutic gene in a safe and transient way.

Extracellular matrix microarrays to study inductive signaling for endoderm specification.

UNLABELLED During tissue development, stem and progenitor cells are faced with fate decisions coordinated by microenvironmental cues. Although insights have been gained from in vitro and in vivo studies, the role of the microenvironment remains poorly understood due to the inability to systematically explore combinations of stimuli at a large scale. To overcome such restrictions, we implemented an extracellular matrix (ECM) array platform that facilitates the study of 741 distinct combinations of 38 different ECM components in a systematic, unbiased and high-throughput manner. Using embryonic stem cells as a model system, we derived definitive endoderm progenitors and applied them to the array platform to study the influence of ECM, including the interactions of ECM with growth factor signaling, on the specification of definitive endoderm cells towards the liver and pancreas fates. We identified ECM combinations that influence endoderm fate decisions towards these lineages, and demonstrated the utility of this platform for studying ECM-mediated modifications to signal activation during liver specification. In particular, defined combinations of fibronectin and laminin isoforms, as well as combinations of distinct collagen subtypes, were shown to influence SMAD pathway activation and the degree of hepatic differentiation. Overall, our systematic high-throughput approach suggests that ECM components of the microenvironment have modulatory effects on endoderm differentiation, including effects on lineage fate choice and cell adhesion and survival during the differentiation process. This platform represents a robust tool for analyzing effects of ECM composition towards the continued improvement of stem cell differentiation protocols and further elucidation of tissue development processes. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE Cellular microarrays can provide the capability to perform high-throughput investigations into the role of microenvironmental signals in a variety of cell functions. This study demonstrates the utility of a high-throughput cellular microarray approach for analyzing the effects of extracellular matrix (ECM) in liver and pancreas differentiation of endoderm progenitor cells. Despite an appreciation that ECM is likely involved in these processes, the influence of ECM, particularly combinations of matrix proteins, had not been systematically explored. In addition to the identification of relevant ECM compositions, this study illustrates the capability of the cellular microarray platform to be integrated with a diverse range of cell fate measurements, which could be broadly applied towards the investigation of cell fate regulation in other tissue development and disease contexts.

A quantitative method to evaluate mesenchymal stem cell lipofection using real-time PCR.

Genetic modification of human mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) is a powerful tool to improve the therapeutic utility of these cells and to increase the knowledge on their regulation mechanisms. In this context, strong efforts have been made recently to develop efficient nonviral gene delivery systems. Although several studies addressed this question most of them use the end product of a reporter gene instead of the DNA uptake quantification to test the transfection efficiency. In this study, we established a method based on quantitative real‐time PCR (RT‐PCR) to determine the intracellular plasmid DNA copy number in human MSC after lipofection. The procedure requires neither specific cell lysis nor DNA purification. The influence of cell number on the RT‐PCR sensitivity was evaluated. The method showed good reproducibility, high sensitivity, and a wide linear range of 75–2.5 × 106 plasmid DNA copies per cell. RT‐PCR results were then compared with the percentage of transfected cells assessed by flow cytometry analysis, which showed that flow cytometry‐based results are not always proportional to plasmid cellular uptake determined by RT‐PCR. This work contributed for the establishment of a rapid quantitative assay to determine intracellular plasmid DNA in stem cells, which will be extremely beneficial for the optimization of gene delivery strategies.

Microcarrier Culture Systems for Stem Cell Manufacturing

Abstract Stem cells hold a great promise for the generation of new cell therapies for many currently untreatable diseases, for human disease modeling or drug discovery. Many of these applications, however, will require the production of very large numbers of cells. A versatile system for the large-scale production of stem cells under adherent conditions is provided by microcarrier culture technology, which has been originally developed for animal cell culture in suspension bioreactors. This chapter describes the main characteristics of stem cell culture on microcarriers, providing an overview of the different bioprocess development steps. General guidelines and methodologies for the selection of the most appropriate microcarrier and its adaptation for the different stem cell types are provided as well as strategies for cell inoculation, bioreactor operation, and efficient cell harvesting and downstream processing.

Spintronic chip cytometer

Modern flow cytometers are being developed with enhanced portability for on-site measurements, and by integrating magnetoresistive sensors within microfluidic channels (to detect magnetically labeled cells), external and expensive equipment can be avoided. This work describes the real-time detection of Kg1-a cells magnetically labeled with 50 nm magnetic particles using a magnetoresistive based cell cytometer. When flowing through a microchannel 150 μm wide and 14 μm high, with speeds around 1 cm/s, the average observed signals were bipolar with an amplitude of 10 to 20 μV (0-p) corresponding to cell events. The number of cells counted by the SV cytometer has been compared with that obtained with a hemocytometer, and both methods agree within the respective error bars.

Thermodynamics of the adsorption of monoclonal antibodies in phenylboronate chromatography: Affinity versus multimodal interactions

The aim of this work was to investigate the complex phenomena underlying the adsorption of an anti-human IL-8 (anti-IL8) monoclonal antibody (mAb) to m-aminophenylboronate (m-APBA) by Flow Microcalorimetry (FMC) and to understand the role of non-specific interactions in the adsorption process. FMC was exploited as a dynamic on-line method to measure instantaneous heat energy transfers in order to understand the surface phenomena underlying mAbs adsorption towards the synthetic ligand m-APBA under different pH (7.5, 8.5, 9.0, 9.5 and 10.0) and salt concentrations (0 and 150 mM NaCl). Results showed that the adsorption of anti-IL8 mAb to m-APBA is enthalpically driven (ΔHads<0), as expected for the predominant reversible esterification reaction between boronates and cis-diols-containing molecules. For all the pH conditions studied, thermograms presented a first exothermic peak, characteristic of the reversible esterification reaction between mAb (pI≥9.3) and m-APBA (pKa = 8.8), except at pH 9.0 in the presence of 150 mM NaCl, for which the thermogram presented a first endothermic peak. The heat of adsorption (ΔHads) obtained at conditions where cis-diol interactions were predominant was approximately -243 ± 38 kJ/mol against -82 ± 14 kJ/mol (p-value < 0.05) obtained at pH 9.0 with 150 mM NaCl. The observed shift in the thermogram profile at pH 9.0, 150 mM NaCl, and the consequent decrease of 60-70% in ΔHads were indicative of the promotion of electrostatic interactions between the protein and the ligand. Overall, and whereas the binding of the PBA ligand to mAb molecules has been described for decades as being affinity-based, our study demonstrates the multimodal behaviour of this interaction and contributes towards the understanding of the adsorption thermodynamics.