Merck Millipore, the Life Science division of Merck, and Plasticell of London, UK, today announced the availability of OsteoMAX-XF™, the first fully defined, xeno-free human mesenchymal stem cell differentiation medium for the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells into osteocytes.

• Enables rapid differentiation of fully functional human bone tissue from MSCs
• More consistent and potent than currently available formulations
• Accelerates time to mineralization to less than one week compared to the typical three weeks

Mineralization can be detected in less than one week, whereas competing products that contain serum require approximately 21 days to produce similar levels of bone formation.

The formulation, licensed from Plasticell, produces more consistent and potent osteogenic differentiation than currently available formulations, enabling a more reproducible, efficient method for creating bone tissue and advancing research in bone disease and healing.  Merck Millipore manufactures and distributes the medium globally for research purposes while Plasticell retains all rights over therapeutic applications.

"This unique media formulation will help accelerate research in a wide range of bone related diseases such as osteoporosis," noted Nick Asbrock, stem cell product manager at Merck Millipore.  "Researchers will now be able to derive bone tissue from MSCs in a more rapid and consistent manner."

The OsteoMAX-XF™ differentiation media adds to Merck Millipore's comprehensive portfolio of mesenchymal stem cell products including primary human and rat mesenchymal stem cell lines, expansion media, antibodies, characterization kits, growth factors and ECM proteins.

The optimized, single application osteogenic medium was developed using Plasticell's combinatorial screening system that performed a rapid screen of 3,375 combinations of fully defined cell culture media, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of combinations of media components.

Development and optimization of the medium using CombiCult® and the close collaboration between Merck Millipore and Plasticell is described in a recent sp² article entitled "Applying mesenchymal stem cell technology to drug discovery and cell therapy" (sp² Inter-Active, January/February 2013, pp16-18, 

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