Scalable Production of Glioblastoma Cancer Stem Cells in 3 Dimension Thermoreversible Hydrogels for Drug Discovery

There is growing interest in developing drugs that specifically target glioblastoma cancer stem cells. Current cell culture methods, however, cannot cost-effectively produce the large numbers of glioblastoma cancer stem cells required for drug discovery and development. In this paper we report a new method that encapsulates patient-derived primary glioblastoma cancer stem cells and grows them in 3 dimension thermoreversible hydrogels. Our method allows long-term culture (~ 50 days, 10 passages tested, accumulative ~>10¹⁰-fold expansion) with both high growth rate (~ 20-fold expansion / 7 days) and high volumetric yield (~ 2.0 x10⁷ cells/ml) without the loss of stemness. The scalable method can be used to produce sufficient, affordable glioblastoma cancer stem cells for drug discovery.