Assessment of a new economic xeno-free and serum-free human mesenchymal stem cells culture medium with optimal proliferation and differentiation capacities

Abstract

Abstract Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) possess broad prospects in pre-clinical research. In vitro amplification requires appropriate medium to reach the number of seed cells with clinical significance. However, the uncertainty of the heterologous components of the traditional fetal bovine serum (FBS) culture medium has great safety risks. Then existing commercial hMSCs medium is very expensive, a safer and more economical hMSCs medium is urgently needed. Therefore, we developed a noval hMSCs medium without xenogenic components, it is mainly composed of knockout serum replacement (KSR), constituting additionally four components such as fibroblast growth factor and transferrin, named E5 SFM. Here, we mainly compared the E5 SFM with traditional FBS-containing medium and a commercial medium by surface markers testing, proliferation assay, adipogenic and osteogenic differentiation assessment. We demonstrated that hMSCs cultured in the E5 SFM showed similar morphological characteristics and immunophenotypes to those in other media. Notably, cell proliferative capability was similar to that in the commercial medium, but higher than that in the FBS-containing medium and other media, their capabilities of adipogenic and osteogenic differentiation was significantly higher than other media. Consequently, we concluded that the E5 SFM medium can not only effectively promote cell proliferation of hMSCs, but also has low price and clear and simple ingredients.