STEMCELL Technologies Inc. 4 articles published in JoVE Developmental Biology Differentiation of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells into Insulin-Producing Islet Clusters Jia Zhao*1, Shenghui Liang*1, Mitchell J. S. Braam1, Robert K. Baker1, Diepiriye G. Iworima1,2, Nina Quiskamp3, Timothy J. Kieffer1,2,4 1Department of Cellular & Physiological Sciences, Life Science Institute, University of British Columbia, 2School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia, 3STEMCELL Technologies Inc, 4Department of Surgery, University of British Columbia The differentiation of stem cells into islet cells provides an alternative solution to conventional diabetes treatment and disease modeling. We describe a detailed stem cell culture protocol that combines a commercial differentiation kit with a previously validated method to aid in producing insulin-secreting, stem cell-derived islets in a dish. Biology Culture Methods to Study Apical-Specific Interactions using Intestinal Organoid Models Georgios Stroulios*1, Martin Stahl*2, Fisal Elstone*2, Wing Chang1, Sharon Louis2, Allen Eaves2,3, Salvatore Simmini1, Ryan K. Conder2 1STEMCELL Technologies Ltd., 2STEMCELL Technologies Inc., 3Terry Fox Laboratory, BC Cancer Here we present two protocols that allow the modeling of intestinal apical-specific interactions. Organoid-derived intestinal monolayers and Air-Liquid Interface (ALI) cultures facilitate the generation of well-differentiated epithelia accessible from both luminal and basolateral sides, whereas polarity-inverted intestinal organoids expose their apical side and are amenable to high throughput assays. Biology Hepatic Progenitor Specification from Pluripotent Stem Cells using a Defined Differentiation System Jose Meseguer-Ripolles1, Yu Wang1, Agnes Sorteberg1, Aishwariya Sharma2, Nan-Linda Ding2, Baltasar Lucendo-Villarin1, Philipp Kramer2, Charis-Patricia Segeritz2, David C. Hay1 1MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh, 2Research & Development, STEMCELL Technologies Inc The goal of this article is to provide a standardized approach to induce human hepatic progenitor differentiation from pluripotent stem cells. The development of this procedure with ready-to-use media formulations offer the user a facile system to generate human liver cells for biomedical research and translation. Neuroscience Neural-Colony Forming Cell Assay: An Assay To Discriminate Bona Fide Neural Stem Cells from Neural Progenitor Cells Hassan Azari1,2, Sharon A. Louis3, Sharareh Sharififar1, Vinata Vedam-Mai1, Brent A. Reynolds1 1Department of Neurosurgery, University of Florida, 2Department of Anatomical Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, 3STEMCELL Technologies, Inc. This video protocol demonstrates how to discriminate and enumerate bona fide neural stem cells in a mixed population of neural precursor cells using the neural colony-forming cell assay.