Cores laboratories: Organization for stem cell technology advancement

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

As new technologies develop in biomedical sciences, pockets of technical expertise arise in individual scientific Institutions and these in turn evolve into centers of excellence for a given technology.These centers of excellence tend to be referred to as 'shared' or 'core' facilities and they play a key role in establishing best practice, setting quality standards, providing skilled services, advancing technologies and through economies of scale, delivering value for money (Meder et al., 2016;Chang and Grieder, 2016;Hockberger et al., 2018).With the generation of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines in 1998 (Thomson et al., 1998;Ludwig et al., 2018) and their promise as tools for development, disease modelling and therapeutic application, a new portfolio of cell culture techniques began to be developed and along with this, associated technologies.This field required expertise and training in a number of areas and soon centers providing training in hESC work were established.The WiCell Stem Cell Bank was the first center to be set up in 1999.They not only distribute hESC lines but also provide characterization services and initially offered training for the culture of hPSCs.Subsequent to this, a number of similar centers were launched globally.In 2007 the generation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) (Yu et al., 2007;Takahashi et al., 2007) provided yet another branch of research and development in this scientific area.As the field grew so did the number of core facilities, providing training, services and materials to both research and translational scientists.Quality standards were established (International Stem Cell Banking Initiative, 2009) and common practices were shared between expert centers.A need to establish networks of core facilities was identified by groups of pluripotent stem cell facility directors and this resulted in the formation of the COREdinates and the Pluricore groups.