An in vitro comparative analysis of the growth factors present in FBS vs PLAY®

Growth factors are natural substances and vital cell culture media components that provide the appropriate environment for cell growth, migration, differentiation, and tissue morphogenesis. Growth factors such as HGF, IGF, TGF-β, FGF, PDGF, VEGF, EGF are present in the growth supplement used for in vitro culturing of animal and human cell-lines. Fetal bovine serum (FBS) is the most widely used growth factor supplement. It contains micro and macronutrients used for clinical and research cell culture such as the culture of Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). But it has been observed that MSCs grown in FBS reach senescence by passage. FBS is also becoming more unsuitable due to increasing demand, high price, collection methods, batch to batch variability and immunoreaction in clinical recipients. All these reasons have led the research field to question its suitability in clinical stem cell expansion purposes and find a suitable alternative. In order to address the above issues, we undertook a study to find the growth factor concentrations present in PLAY® which is human-derived, xenogen-free, cost-effective, growth factor rich concentrate. We hypothesized that PLAY® could contain high concentrations of many growth factors required for MSCs to proliferate to a higher passage. Our study found that PLAY® contained higher concentrations of various growth factors such as HGF, VEGF, TGF-β, MMP-2, MMP-9, TIMP-1, and TIMP-2 when compared to FBS. Hence PLAY® could serve as a good substitute for FBS in culturing MSCs for clinical applications. Future studies can be conducted to deduce the mechanism behind PLAY®’s increased proliferative capabilities.