Abstract

Through an ongoing, collaborative,
public-private partnership, the European Bank for induced Pluripotent Stem
Cells (EBiSC, https://cells.ebisc.org/) is
a centralised, non-profit repository and distribution hub to ensure long term
storage of deposited human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) lines and
their distribution to academic and commercial researchers worldwide. With EBiSC
holding >800 hiPSC lines, across >35 disease areas, shared by 19
different institutions across Europe and North America, implementing a robust
multi-partner infrastructure to ensure cost-efficient collection,
qualification, standardisation, distribution and downstream use of hiPSC lines
from a multitude of international sources has been a critical output of EBiSC
to date. Focused on accelerating downstream use of hiPSCs for disease modelling
and drug discovery, a second project phase started in March 2019.

Critical processes include (i) consent review process to ensure use
of appropriate consent templates and clear communication of use restrictions if
present; (ii) novel processes for
culturing, banking and differentiating hiPSCs in a high throughput manner using
a benchtop bioreactor to increase efficiency and throughput; (iii) a robust Quality Control screening
regime ensuring that hiPSC lines from varying sources perform comparably in the
hands of users and are of a high quality and integrity; (iv) collection, standardisation and sharing of hiPSC datasets via
the human Pluripotent Stem Cell Registry (hPSCreg, https://hpscreg.eu/);
(v) establishment of an EBiSC data
access committee for management of genomic datasets; (vi) implementation of a simplified access procedure to allow
access to hiPSC lines from multiple sources simultaneously under a single
access agreement.