The Red Herring is reporting that the WiCell Research Institute, a private laboratory affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has successfully tested a new medium for growing stem cells without animal products. According to the article:
Until now, when biologists grew stem cells in a medium, they carefully included a complicated mixture of hormones, growth factors, and blood serum that came from animal cells.
While a few groups of scientists have cultured already-established human embryonic stem cells in an animal-product-free medium, none managed to derive new stem cell lines in this way.
“We describe the derivation of two new human embryonic stem cell lines in