Patent ID: 8828720

Claim:
A method of culturing and expanding pluripotent stem cells in suspension culture in vitro, the method comprising: (i) attaching pluripotent stem cells to a plurality of microcarriers to form microcarrier-stem cell complexes, wherein the surface of the microcarriers is coated in laminin; (ii) culturing the microcarrier-stem cell complexes in suspension culture; (iii) passaging the cultured cells from (ii); and (iv) repeating steps (i)-(iii) through at least 7 passages, wherein the cells in the culture after step (iv) comprise pluripotent stem cells and said pluripotent stem cells are expanded, thereby producing expanded pluripotent stem cells in culture, and wherein the number of said expanded pluripotent stem cells at the end of step (ii) is at least 0.2 order of magnitude greater than the number of cells attached to the microcarriers in step (i).