Sigma® Life Science Launches Novel, Affordable Pluripotent Stem Cell Culture Medium

ST. LOUIS, Oct. 3, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Sigma-Aldrich ^® Corporation (Nasdaq: SIAL) announced today that Sigma Life Science, its innovative biological products and services research business, has launched Stemline ^® Pluripotent Culture Medium, a novel human pluripotent stem cell culture medium that provides a consistent environment for the long-term maintenance and growth of healthy pluripotent stem cells. The new medium performs equivalently to the industry's leading medium and provides academic and pharmaceutical stem cell research labs with a substantially lower cost alternative to higher priced media. Additional information and sample requests of the Stemline Pluripotent Culture Medium are available at www.sigma.com/stemlinepsc.

"The exorbitant cost of media for pluripotent stem cells is a universal complaint from the stem cell research community. Our Stemline Pluripotent Culture Medium performs equivalently to the leading medium for maintaining pluripotency and optimal growth rates, and is produced more efficiently than traditional media, resulting in lower costs. For example, a typical academic lab that consumes three 500 mL bottles of media per week could save at least $12,000 annually using our new Stemline medium. A high-throughput pharmaceutical development team that consumes 20 liters of media weekly could save more than $160,000 annually," said John Listello, Market Segment Manager for Regenerative Medicine at Sigma Life Science.

Culturing pluripotent stem cells can be challenging as many media's undefined, heterogenous mixtures can cause inconsistent growth rates and undesired spontaneous differentiation. The Stemline Pluripotent Stem Cell Culture Medium is serum-free, composed of fully-defined components and has 80% less basic fibroblast growth factor than the leading pluripotent stem cell culture medium. This provides a consistent environment for long-term maintenance of optimal growth rates, viability and pluripotency. Rigorous characterization of the Stemline Pluripotent Stem Cell Culture Medium has demonstrated that cultured pluripotent stem cells display all established pluripotency markers and maintain proper karyotype and the ability to differentiate into each of the three germ layers. The feeder-independent medium also enables culturing with synthetic matricies, thereby eliminating a source of variability that would prohibit later clinical applications.

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