Overcoming Challenges in the Culture of Human Immune Cells
BPS is the expert in recombinant proteins and enzymes, cell lines, viral-based tools, and biochemical and cellular assay systems. Read here more about how to overcome the challenges of human immune cell culture.
Overcoming Challenges in the Culture of Human Immune Cells
Human cells used in vitro are essential for studying cellular responses under controlled conditions outside the body, driving therapeutic discoveries. However, culture conditions can significantly impact cell phenotype and experimental outcomes.
As living systems, cells require high-quality culture environments to survive and maintain their biological characteristics. Primary immune cells are particularly sensitive, with their performance critically dependent on media composition. Culture media provide essential nutrients like amino acids, carbohydrates, vitamins, growth factors, and hormones that support cellular function. Complete media typically contain like animal serum, commonly derived from fetal, newborn, or calf bovine sources, which represent the primary source of variability in cell culture. Serum is a complex mixture of hundreds of identified and unidentified components. Its composition varies dramatically based on factors like animal sex, diet, genetics, and geographic origin. Such variability can lead to substantial differences in cell characteristics and response to drugs and other stimuli, challenging experimental reproducibility.
Thus, serum-free media offer more controlled alternatives, containing only essential, defined components. These formulations may require supplementation with growth factors such as insulin, IL-2, or other cytokine that support the growth of specific cell types.
Immune Cells
Primary human immune cells, including T and natural killer (NK) cells, are increasingly valuable in cell and gene therapy research. While providing more clinically relevant models than animal studies, these cells present unique culturing challenges:
Limited viability after freezing/thawing
Short persistence periods
Requirement for full activation to maintain functionality
Rare – with each specialized type of immune cell representing only a fraction of the total immune cell population
Specialized media that can maintain immune cell function and enable expansion are critical.
The availability of specialized media for routine primary cell culture and expansion, specifically optimized for T and NK cells, can considerably accelerate a research program by eliminating the need for lengthy periods of optimization. Serum-free products can eliminate variability and enhance consistency by providing controlled, reproducible conditions.
Ready-to-use, anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 antibody cocktail for potent T cell activation and expansion
NK Cell Media and Reagents
NK cells can be expanded ex vivo by adding cytokines and feeder cells. The use of cytokines alone provides a short-term activation but supports only moderate expansion, while co-called feeder cells support expansion, but without activation. Genetically modified feeder cells, such as K562 cells expressing membrane-bound IL-15, IL-21, 4-1BBL or OX40L, in combination with cytokines, can result in more than 1000-fold expansion over a two-week period with a high proportion of highly cytotoxic cells. With this in mind, we have developed an NK Cell Expansion Kit composed of Growth-Arrested NK Feeder Cells, NK Cell Basal Medium and IL-2, which results in high fold expansion. The kit provides researchers with cytotoxic NK cells without the need to create their own optimized K562 cell line.
Expansion of human NK cell ex vivo at different time points during culture. Human PBMCs (peripheral blood mononuclear cells, A) and isolated NK cells (B) were expanded ex vivo for 14/18 days, stained with PE-Labeled anti-NCAM1 Antibody, and FITC-Labeled Anti-CD3 Antibody, and analyzed by flow cytometry. The number of CD3–CD56+ cells was determined, and fold expansion was calculated in relation to CD3–CD56+ cell number on day 0.
Direct contact technical support
Find products for your research
