Regenerative medicine is a medical technology that repairs and regenerates tissues and organs whose functions have been impaired by disease or injury. To achieve this, it is necessary to efficiently and appropriately culture human cells outside the body, but until now, it has been necessary to extract collagen and biological components from animals other than humans and use them as culture substrates. However, because animal-derived materials carry the risk of immune rejection and infection, there has been a demand for cell culture substrates that are completely free of animal components (xeno-free).

　The research group focused on the nanostructures common to both wood and humans, namely, "nanofiber shape" and "regular polysaccharide interfacial structure," and discovered that by introducing biofunctional groups such as sulfate groups while maintaining the crystalline structure into cellulose nanofibers derived from trees, which originally have no cell adhesion ability, excellent cell adhesion and proliferation properties can be expressed.

　As a result, they succeeded in xeno-free culture of mesenchymal stem cells taken from human iliac bone marrow without using any animal-derived components. They achieved a culture efficiency comparable to that of conventional animal-derived collagen, using only plant components.

　It is expected that this discovery will be useful not only for regenerative medicine using human stem cells, but also for the development of technologies to create cells with the functions of in vivo tissues and organs outside the body, as well as fundamental technologies to support drug discovery that utilize these technologies.

Paper information:【Carbohydrate Polymers】Primary human mesenchymal stem cell culture under xeno-free conditions using surface-modified cellulose nanofiber scaffolds