Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) and their progeny such as hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes and neural cells hold great potential as a source for cell therapy and regenerative medicine, as well can be effectively used for high high content screening (HCS) of drug candidates and for toxicity tests. Cryopreservation (CP), storage, and shipment of the cells are key elements for eventual clinical, pharmaceutical and environmental applications, which will require large numbers of quality controlled and ready for use cells. Traditionally, the cells are frozen in suspensions of either fully dissociated cells) or loosely associated clusters such as clumps of hPSCs, clusters of beaters”of cardiomyocytes, (“or neurospheres of neural precursors. Beside logistical inconvenience for some applications such as HCS, additional manipulation with the cells (detachment, dissociation and centrifugation) can introduce substantial stress to the cells prior to freezing and after thawing, which per se may tremendously decrease the cell cryosurvival and functionality. Here, we are presenting ComfortFreezer™, a novel bench-top device specifically designed for cryopreservation in multi-well plates for cell-based high content screening (HCS), which combines a liquid-nitrogen (LN2) free programmable freezer This cryogenic equipemnt can bring serious advantage for HCS in drug screening, environmental toxicity evaluation, and other variety of HCS-based applications.
Patient specific modeling can provide detailed hemodynamic information that is not available through most standard imaging modalities. The vertebrobasilar system is comprised of the confluence of the two vertebral arteries into the basilar artery, followed by divergence into the posterior cerebral arteries. A pilot study, by Kansagra and Wong [2], utilized vessel-encoded arterial spin labeling, an experimental MRI technique to quantify vertebrobasilar perfusion. In this method, flow in different vessels can be tagged, and perfusion of tagged flow to different regions of the brain can be quantified. These results demonstrated that blood delivered to the right hemisphere came primarily from the right vertebral, and vice versa.
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