Microcapsule Co-Culture System Enhances Neural Differentiation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells

Abstract

Cell co-culture plays a key role in inducing the committed differentiation of stem cells in vitro, which mimics the specific tissue microenvironment in vivo by means of co-cultured inducing cells. However, the present cell co-culture systems limit the application of differentiated cells due to the safety and the scale of these systems. This study established a novel microcapsule co-culture system and investigated the probable effect of microencapsulated co-cultured neural cells on neural differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) ex vivo. Mouse bone marrow-derived MSCs were co-cultured with SHSY5Y cells microencapsulated in alginatepolylysine-alginate (APA) microcapsules. The quantitative and qualitative analysis showed that the expression of Nestin (Nes) was significantly increased at both gene and protein levels in the microcapsule co-culture system compared with other systems without cell co-culture, which indicated that more neural progenitors were obtained from this novel microcapsule co-culture system. According to our results and the unique characteristics of microcapsules, it is possible that large-scale cell co-culture system based on the combination of microcapsule and bioreactor technologies will be developed to generate numerous MSCs-derived neural progenitors for clinical applications in the future.