Customer testimonials

Human PSC & hematopoietic cells

“By introducing the use of LN521, shifting our culture methods away from relying on murine feeders or other less defined substrates, we have simplified the day-to-day expansion of our human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC) and significantly reduced the amount of required operator time. Having worked extensively with other culture methods for hPSCs, and thereby familiar with the high costs of consumables required, I am pleased to find that our new costs are only a fraction (7%) of what they used to be when we relied on traditional methods that used murine embryonic fibroblasts (MEF).”

“In our efforts to study the development of blood, we have found that keeping our hPSCs on LN521 is compatible with subsequent differentiation towards the hematopoietic lineage, further adding to the usefulness of this substrate regarding our experiments.”

Dr. Roger E. Rönn,

Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland

Satellite cells

“Laminin-521 shifts away from the paradigm that muscle cells lose their ability to differentiate after culturing.”

“Muscle differentiation on laminin-521 is nothing short of spectacular, yielding increased numbers of nuclei per myotube and improved myotube organization. Surprisingly, muscle cells expanded on laminin-521 maintain their ability to differentiate into myotubes after long-term passaging, better-resembling differentiation of freshly isolated cells.”

“Muscle cells grow 2-3 times more rapidly on laminin-521 compared to other substrates. On laminin-521, 90-100% of muscle cells are simultaneously in the cell cycle compared to about 50% or less on other commonly utilized substrates. I believe by attaining uniform expansion it may be possible to reduce selection processes that often plague traditional muscle cell culture.”

“For drug discovery purposes, laminin-521 allows you to rapidly expand muscle cells into 100 million cells or greater while maintaining excellent differentiation; it’s a win-win.”

Dr. Christopher Penton

Icagen, Inc., Tucson, Arizona, USA

Read how laminin-521 maintains the differentiation potential of mouse and human satellite cell-derived myoblasts during long-term culture expansion, published in Skeletal Muscle, 2016.

Dopaminergic neurons

“We have struggled for a number of years to establish a GMP manufacturing process for generating DA neurons from human embryonic stem cells in order to develop a stem cell-based therapy for Parkinson’s Disease. The recombinant laminins from Biolamina really made a world of difference! We now routinely use LN521 and EDTA for passaging the pluripotent stem cells and we have greater efficiency than ever before.”

“It also turns out that the DA progenitor cells love to grow on LN111 and after introducing this into our protocol we now have a high yield, high-quality GMP differentiation ready to use”

Prof. Malin Parmar

Lund University, Sweden 

A GMP differentiation protocol for highly efficient and reproducible production of transplantable dopamine progenitors from hESCs on laminin-111 have been published inCell Stem Cell, 2016.

Human ESC and iPSC

“We have changed our hESC and hiPSC cultures from a MEF-based system to laminin-521 in combination with Nutristem medium. This system allows a more standardized culture, independent of variable batches of MEFs. We experienced that the laminin-521 culture system has high efficiency and lower labor-intensity when compared to the MEF-based systems. LN521 enabled us to culture our cell lines more flexibly, using only small quantities of cells for routine maintenance of lines and allowing a fast upscaling of cultures when experiments are planned.”

Dr. Mieke Geens

Medical School of the Vrije Universiteit, Belgium

Platelets

“Before BioLamina, it was challenging to assess the reactivity of individual laminin isoforms towards cells because it is very difficult to purify laminins from tissues. Using the recombinant and very pure laminins from BioLamina, we could show that vascular isoforms containing the α5 or α4 but not α2 chain support efficient blood platelet adhesion and activation under flow in a process dependent on integrin α6β1, GPVI and the GPIb-VWF axis.”

Dr. Mathieu Schaff

INSERM, Université de Strasbourg, France

Different laminin isoforms were used in: “Integrin α6β1 is the Main Receptor for Vascular Laminins and Plays a Role in Platelet Adhesion, Activation and Arterial Thrombosis”, published in Circulation, 2013.

T-cells

“Commercial preparations of laminin from other sources tended to be inconsistent mixtures of multiple laminin isoforms. The recombinant laminins from Biolamina allowed us to identify interactions between MCAM and specific isoforms of laminin that may underlay important aspects of T cell biology.”

Dr. Kenneth Flanagan

Elan Pharmaceuticals, USA

Human ESC and iPSC

“The beginning of my project required the introduction of fully defined culture conditions for both the self-renewal and subsequent differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). In conjunction with fully defined media, I evaluated the performance of various commercially available matrices for their ability to support hPSC self-renewal.”

“Recombinant laminin-521 (LN521) quickly became my favorite due to reliable passaging outcomes, speed of hPSC growth and the absence of spontaneous differentiation. Following the adaptation of 10 clinical-grade human embryonic stem cell lines to this matrix we found no detriment to their genetic stability as seen by SNP array analysis. It is safe to say that with the use of LN521, the culture of human PSCs has become as straight-forward as that of their mouse counterparts.”

Dr. Maurice A. Canham

MRC Centre for regenerative medicine,
The University of Edinburgh, UK

LN-521 was used in the report published by Canham et al., The Molecular Karyotype of 25 Clinical-Grade Human Embryonic Stem Cell Lines, Scientific Reports, 2015.