Encapsulated islets quality control

Transcript

Peter Hosking - Living Cell Technologies

The next stage is to reculture the islets again because the islets, in order to thrive and prosper, have to be put in media where they’ll have nutrients. They have to be put in an incubator at the right temperature, which is 37 degrees. And so we culture them in what we call T-flasks, which are very traditional cell culture vessels where you have a very thin layer of media on the bottom of a plastic ​container, and we’ll culture them in these T-flasks for as many days as we need to, before patient implanting.

But we also have a number of other quality control checks that we run. Typically, we’ll do this 2 days to 3 days after we’ve encapsulated the islets. At that stage, we’ll harvest the islets and we’ll run a number of tests on them. Again, we’ll be looking at the purity of the islets, the viability of the islets, and we’re talking about encapsulated islets now. We also measure the insulin production, and that’s the SGS assay, and we have very strict quality control acceptance criteria where each batch must meet our acceptance criteria for insulin response.