Reducing oxidative stress improves ex vivo polymer-based human haematopoietic stem and progenitor cell culture and gene editing

Self-renewing multipotent haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) have the unique capacity to stably regenerate the entire blood and immune systems following transplantation. HSCs are used clinically to reconstitute a healthy blood system in patients suffering from a range of haematological diseases. However, HSCs are very rare and have been challenging to grow ex vivo, which has hampered efforts to collect large numbers of HSCs for both basic research and clinical therapies. Polymer-based culture conditions have recently been developed to support expansion of mouse and human haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs). While mouse HSPCs expanded rapidly in polymer-based cultures, growth speeds for human HSPCs in polymer-based cultures was limited to ~70-fold over 4-weeks. Here we have found that reducing oxidative stress improves human HSPC growth in these conditions. We describe an optimised culture condition that improves growth to 250-1400-fold over 4-weeks through reducing oxygen tension and the addition of antioxidants. These conditions also enable efficient gene editing in these polymer-based cultures. We envision these improved culture conditions will support a range of research into human HSPC biology and provide a platform for clinical-scale HSPC expansion and gene editing.