About the Edinburgh Progenitor Cell Bank
About the Edinburgh Progenitor Bank (EPB) work, goals, storage, funding and support.
Why do we need a human progenitor cell bank?
The EPB is committed to provide high quality cryopreserved stem cell derived progenitor cells with the purpose of sharing this technology with the research community.
Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) or human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) are differentiated along a particular lineage, such as midbrain dopaminergic (mDA) neurons, and then cryopreserved in a progenitor state. These “partially” differentiated frozen cells are then distributed to academia or industry lab. Researchers can then thaw the progenitor cells, complete the final stages of the differentiation protocol, and then conduct their experiments.
The major advantage of the EPB is the quality-control conducted on the progenitor cells to maximise the success rate of obtaining functional human cells for experiments. We have optimised for the cryopreservation and recovery of human midbrain dopaminergic progenitor cells (Drummond et al., 2020).
Progenitor cells have the potential to mature in specific type of neurons. Our goal is to cryopreserve different types of progenitor cells, such as cortical and dopaminergic progenitors which can resume differentiation and eventually mature into functional cortical and dopaminergic neurons.
What is currently available from the EPB?
We currently have midbrain dopaminergic (mDA) progenitors cryopreserved at day 16 of the mDA differentiation protocol. The mDA progenitors are derived from RC17 hESCs and from AST18, AST23, and NAS2 iPSCs. The AST lines have triplication of the SNCA gene, a familial cause of Parkinson’s disease (Devine et al., 2011). We also have isogenic controls of RC17, AST18, and AST23 with SNCA deleted by CRISPR/Cas9 (Chen et al., 2019).
Funding & support
EPB was established at the University of Edinburgh with funding from:
- National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs)
- Cure Parkinson's
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
- Medical Research Council (MRC)
Contact us
Please contact Prof Tilo Kunath (tilo.kunath@ed.ac.uk) to enquire about accessing cryopreserved progenitor cells from the EPB.