Revisiting the determination of hydromechanical stresses encountered by microcarriers in stem cell culture bioreactors

Background Expansion of mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) is one of the key steps for their use in tissue engineering or cell therapies. Today, expansion processes are mainly based on the use of microcarriers to allow large interfacial adherence areas [1]. However, this culture technology is known to be practically limited to low agitation intensity and microcarrier concentrations due to possible cell damage arising from particle hydromechanical stress or collisions between microcarriers [2]. Unfortunately, the description of the relationship between bioreactor hydrodynamics, microcarrier suspension and occurrence of collisions was neither clearly established in the case of stem cell cultures, nor based on a local description of the bioreactor hydrodynamics heterogeneity. Thus, in the present study, it is proposed to use numerical simulations to describe not only the liquid phase but also the microcarrier dispersion and the occurrence of hydromechanical stress encountered by the microcarriers. Two kinds of hydromechanical stress can be distinguished: (i) fluid-solid interactions (fluid shear stress) arising from turbulent eddies and (ii) solid-solid interactions arising from collisions between microcarriers or between microcarriers and bioreactor walls [2].