Hepatocyte culture - (Feb/05/2009 )

Hi,
i am looking for media suggestions of people who have experience with hepatocytes. I am planning to buy the cells from Lonza and they are recommending some HCM media which is not common and very expensive. And they are very secretive about the media formulation (they jsut told me that it has no FBS). I have seen people using DMEM w/ FBS and w/o FBS in the literature. Would anybody have a suggestions about the media issue (FBS or no FBS, DMEM or HCM) or even hepatocyte culture in general...Thanks!

in my lab a former researcher purchased hepatocytes (from two different human donors) from lonza plus their culture medium also from lonza and the experiment costed about 3000 us dollars. but Invitrogen offers cheaper prices.

Hi, I work with rat and murine hepatocytes. We have been culturing them successfully in Waymouth'sMB 752/1 medium purchased from Gibco BRL. We add 5%BGS plus pen/strep.

Dark Monarch on Sep 10 2009, 01:01 PM said:

Hi,
i work with HepG2 cells and they grow easy in DMEM high glucose. Supplementation is easy: 1% L-glutamine, 10 %FBS, 1% antibiotics/antimycotic mix (avoid to using amphotericin B , recommend Itraconazole).
Renew the media in 2 days...... they will grow fine!

Reis, V.P.

If you do buy from Lonza, you should buy some of their medium to start with and then wean the cells onto another (cheaper?) medium that uses similar %CO₂ and other conditions. If they are in a serum free system, it might be best to continue in a serum free system if possible.

Don't use antibiotics in your culture unless you can help it - they mask all sorts of hidden contaminations which do affect your cells.