• Question: How long does it take to extract stem cells?

    Asked by syed to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 11 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      That’s a really hard question!

      I think it will be quite different for different types of stem cells. I work with embryonic stem cells so I’ll answer for them. Altogether, it would take a few weeks to get embryonic stem cells from an embryo. The first part is basically to cut some cells out from the middle of the embryo and would take less than an hour, I think (I might be wrong – I have never done this!). But, then you have a load of cells, which are not all stem cells, some are other parts of the embryo. Over the next few weeks, you gradually grow the stem cells faster than the other cells so that you can have a plate that only contains stem cells.

      I would guess that a similar thing has to be done with adult stem cells to separate them from other types of cells. Maybe the other scientists will know more about this than me!

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      It depends very much on what the tissue is and what cells you want, for stem cells from teeth it takes a couple of hours to change the dental pulp from a piece of tissue to individual cells, after that it takes about 2 weeks for them to grow. For blood stem cells it takes about an hour or 2 to get them but after that the cells can be used. For fat and bone marrow if you want cells that make ‘solid’ tissue it again takes about 2 hours and then 2 weeks growing in the lab. If you are using bone marrow stem cells to help fix a broken bone, you can take the bone marrow and have the cells back in the same patient in about 45 minutes.

    • Photo: Anzy Miller

      Anzy Miller answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      I work with embryonic stem cells as well, and I also have actually never extracted them from the embryo. As you only need one embryo to make a cell line that lasts forever, I have not needed to extracted more stem cells.

      I did do some work with some blood stem cells a while back though – and to get the stem cells out from the mixture of other blood cells doesn’t take long at all! Blood is so easy to get from people/animals – and we can separate the stem cells out in a matter of hours.

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