Maintaining islet quality during culture

Islet transplantation has become a promising treatment for type I diabetes mellitus due to recent success since the development of the Edmonton Protocol. Islet culture prior to transplantation is standard practice in most clinical islet programs. Conventional culture conducted on polystyrene vessels can impose oxygen limitations even at relatively low tissue surface densities. High density islet culture is desirable because it reduces space and handling requirements during culture, but it exacerbates oxygen (02) limitations, causing a reduction in islet viability. The overall objective of this thesis was to maintain islet quality during static culture. As a chemical engineer, I focused on addressing transport limitations present in conventional culture techniques. After demonstrating culture in the absence of 02 transport limitations resulted in nearly 100% recovery of the original viable tissue placed into culture when the combined non-adherent and adherent tissue were considered, I examined the effect of tissue surface density on the recovery of islet tissue, its viability, and its purity for conventional normoxic culture on a polystyrene dish. With conventional culture, the fractional recovery of viable tissue decreased sharply as viable tissue density increased.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Chemical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Rappel, Michael J

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Clark K. Colton and Kenneth A. Smith.

• Chemical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38961

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38961