Professor Peter Gray is the Director and a Group Leader in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and nanotechnology (AIBN) at the University of Queensland. He has extensive experience in bioprocess development for mammalian cell cultures, and is applying this experience to the development of conditions and strategies which will allow the scaleable expansion of pluripotent stem cells under fully defined conditions.

Gray’s group will bring their experience of producing a wide range of recombinant growth factors and ECM molecules and fragments to the SRI, and their ability to evaluate the growth of hESC under defined conditions, using pluripotency reporter cells lines as necessary. The ECM fragments produced will be linked to a number of novel nanoparticles to develop cell growth conditions which will allow hESC to be produced under totally defined conditions in fully controlled stirred minibioreactor systems.

As part of the Stem Cells Australia initiative, Professor Gray’s group will explore the ability to use such systems to produce scaleable numbers of ‘spin EB’ type hES cell particles will be investigated, as will be the controlled differentiation of such cell down specific lineage pathways.