Development of Safe Culture and Handling Systems for Embryos and Transplantable Cells in Medicine and Agriculture

Jaffar Ali

IVF Laboratory, REI Department, Women’s Specialized Hospital
King Fahad Medical City, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

There is a need to develop culture conditions and systems that are safe and non-hazardous for utilization in therapeutic assisted reproduction, regeneration medicine and food production. Present-day culture media contains donor serum proteins that have the potential to transmit harmful protein-bound pathogenic agents to patients, babies and healthcare workers. The European Union urged refrain from use of non-uniform biological preparations (EU Tissue Directive No.2004/23/EU) by April 2007.

This directive does not appear to have been enforced due to the lack of success in developing completely defined culture conditions and systems. Efforts to comply with this directive have led a number of research workers to seek completely defined and synthetic alternatives to donor biological supplements used in culture systems.

To this end at least one group reported the successful development of a completely defined efficacious embryo handling and culture system for the generation of viable cleavage-stage human embryos that resulted in excellent clinical pregnancy rates when transferred to recipients.

As in the human, large scale generation of animal embryos in vitro for food production is also subjected to the same risks due to the use of embryo culture techniques that utilizes undefined or non-uniform donor biological supplements. The use of feeder layers of animal origin for the culture and maintenance of human pluripotent stem cells has rendered all such stem cells lines unsuitable for transplantation due to contamination with immunogenic components released by these feeder layers. Efforts are underway in various laboratories worldwide to develop feeder-free systems or completely defined feeder layers and culture systems.