The islets of Langerhans are the regions of the pancreas that contain its endocrine (i.e., hormone-producing) cells. Discovered in 1869 by German pathological anatomist Paul Langerhans, the islets of Langerhans constitute approximately 1% to 2% of the mass of the pancreas. There are about one million islets distributed throughout the pancreas of a healthy adult human. Each is separated from the surrounding pancreatic tissue by a thin fibrous connective tissue capsule. The islets of Langerhans contain beta cells, which secrete insulin, and play a significant role in diabetes.

Islets are widely used for transplantation to restore beta cell function from diabetes, offering an alternative to a complete pancreas transplantation or an artificial pancreas. Because the beta cells in the islets of Langerhans are selectively destroyed by an autoimmune process in type 1 diabetes, islet transplantation is a means of restoring physiological beta cell function in patients with type 1 diabetes.

Human Islets for Research (HIR)® are primary human islets processed from organ donor pancreases that have been approved for research but not for clinical transplantation of either the  pancreas or the isolated islets. HIR® are obtained in a proprietary process of pancreas digestion and islet purification that results in uniformly high quality HIR® for delivery to diabetes  investigators. Quality Control (QC) testing is routinely performed prior to release to assure uniform quality and function of these islets available for research.

Due to their ability to simulate the characteristics of most soft tissues and natural scaffolds, hydrogels are now an attractive material for developing synthetic Extracellular Matrix (ECM) analogs.

Recently, the VitroGel™ hydrogels have been designed for researchers willing to fully master the characteristics of the synthetic ECM to be used with their 3D / 2D cell cultures. In this post, we will review the main benefits of the recently released VitroGel™ solutions.

Cell viability after cryopreservation is a sensitive subject as it may be dependent on the ability of mammalian cells to face the stress generated by the freeze / thaw cycles. Improving cell viability whilst maintaining optimal cellular functions and pathways has thus become a challenge. In this post, we invite you to take a look at 3 optimized reagents to improve cellular viability after cryopreservation with serum-free and protein-free CryoStor cryopreservation freeze media solutions.

When compared to 2D conventional cell culture systems, experimental data obtained with 3D cell culture models have been shown in many instances to be more biologically relevant, closer to clinical conditions (eg. predictive assays/preclinical therapeutic testing).

In this context, tebu-bio laboratories have developed a spheroid platform with a selection of downstream analysis applications such as live cell imaging, microfluidic and physioxia culture conditions or downstream multiplex biomarker quantification, among others.

If you need more physiologically relevant models for your study, but you don’t have access to the technologies or haven’t the time to spend on setting up spheroid cultures in your own laboratories, read on to see what tebu-bio laboratories can generate for you in terms of data.