Rapid production of HUMAN MAST CELLS

Project Information

MASTFAST

Grant agreement ID: 768728

DOI

10.3030/768728

Project closed

EC signature date 21 November 2017

Start date 1 December 2017

End date 31 May 2019

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 148 914,00

EU contribution

€ 148 914,00

Coordinated by

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MASTFAST (Rapid production of HUMAN MAST CELLS)

Reporting period: 2017-12-01 to 2019-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In this ERC Proof-of-Concept project we developed a novel method for rapid production of human mast cells. Mast cells (MC) are tissue resident immune cells with a key role in normal health processes, such as in inflammation and defense against pathogens. However, a broad range of common severe disorders such as allergies, autoimmune diseases, asthma or mastocytosis are caused by mast cell dysfunction. Treatments to counteract the damaging effects of mast cells are limited and the development of new drugs is hampered due to the difficulties in efficiently obtaining human mast cells for biomedical research. We previously discovered a culture method with genetically engineered mouse pluripotent stem cells (PSC) by which a large number of mouse mast cells could be rapidly produced. The ERC PoC project translated the mouse methodology to human mast cell production. In this project we engineered human pluripotent stem cells, demonstrated that human mast cells can be produced by the translational methodology in a human cell-only co-culture system, and successfully achieved optimization of the culture procedure to produce phenotypic human mast cells within a shorter period of time than previously reported. This procedure was written into a patent application, and further human mast cell functional validation and optimization experiments are underway to facilitate commercial interest.