Advanced Human Cell and Tissue Biomanufacturing

Clinical outcomes of cell therapies and regenerative medicine have shown their great potential in treating human diseases and the cell therapy global market is projected to grow at 36.52% yearly. However, two technical challenges must be addressed to achieve the full potential of cell therapies. The first is to manufacture cells at large scale and with high quality and affordable cost. Currently, consistently producing >1011 cells is still very difficult. The second is the low in vivo homing, survival, function and immune tolerance. Typically, only less than 10% of transplanted cells can survive, resulting in low efficacy. In this talk, I will share our efforts on addressing these two critical problems through the cellular biomanufacturing approach. First, we have developed a new cell culture method called SFIT (i.e. stress-free intra-tubular cell culture technology). SFIT overcomes all the problems of current cell culture methods and results in a paradigm shift in cell culture efficiency including cell viability, growth rate, yield, genetic and phenotype stability, culture consistency and scalability. Using SFIT as the core technology, we have developed devices for automated manufacturing of both autologous and allogeneic cells. Our results show SFIT has very high potential to resolve the cell manufacturing challenge. Second, we have developed a new format of injectable cellular product, synthetic microtissues, to improve cell survival and efficacy in vivo. We have developed scalable methods to generate microtissues with controlled structures. In a rodent Parkinson’s disease model, we have shown these microtissues can significantly improve the efficacy. Biography: Dr. Yuguo Lei received his B.S. in chemistry at Peking University; M.Phil. in polymer science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He then completed his M.S. in Pharmacology and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at UCLA and postdoc in regenerative medicine at UC Berkeley. His lab at the University of Nebraska uses multidisciplinary tools to understand how cells’ genetics, culture microenvironments, culture outcome, and cell properties interplay, and to utilize this information to develop efficient and cell-friendly culture systems. Dr. Lei believes only high-quality cell products can result in safe and effective treatments, and only affordable cell products can benefit a large population of people.