Human Platelet Lysate (hPL) is commonly used as an animal-free alternative to Foetal Bovine Serum (FBS) or Foetal Calf Serum (FCS) in experimental cell culture. XCellR8 is the only laboratory worldwide to have completely eliminated the use of animal-derived components such as FBS in all of our tests, creating an entirely animal-free testing programme for our clients.
We mainly use human serum, donated at FDA approved centres, in the laboratory but wanted to investigate how hPL, which is a similar price, performs in comparison for cell growth, viability and functional cytotoxicity testing.
Download the poster here: hPL evalution poster
Discussion
hPL supported comparable levels of TK 6 and Fibroblast cell proliferation and cell viability at all test concentrations compared with human serum. Cell morphology was unchanged between test and control conditions for both TK 6 and Fibroblast cells. The results for functional cytotoxicity testing using TK 6 showed that 5% and 2.5% hPL produced similar performance compared with 10% human serum. For Fibroblasts, 2% hPL gave the most comparable results compared with 2% HS. In conclusion, hPL offers a viable and cost effective alternative to HS for cell culture models.
