A new study published in Toxicology in Vitro, the Elsevier journal of in vitro and alternative methods in toxicology, adds peer-reviewed evidence to a question that matters far beyond a single laboratory: whether researchers can move away from fetal bovine serum in everyday cell culture without losing the quality of their work. The paper, fittingly titled “Contributing to a (cell) cultural shift”, reports that our portfolio company PL BioScience’s Human Platelet Lysate is a suitable replacement for fetal calf serum when culturing HTR8/SVneo cells, one of the most widely used cell lines in placental, reproductive, and developmental toxicology research.
The work was carried out at the Department of Pharmacology of the Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Utrecht University. The researchers compared the conventional fetal calf serum medium that has been used to culture HTR8/SVneo cells for decades against a serum-free formulation supplemented with varying concentrations of ELAREM™ Prime FD-plus I, PL BioScience’s research-grade Human Platelet Lysate. They looked at the cells both after 24 hours and after three weeks of culture, measuring viability, metabolic activity, cell counts, and signs of cellular stress.
To understand why this matters, it helps to step back briefly. Most cell culture work in life sciences still relies on fetal bovine serum, a supplement extracted from unborn calves at slaughterhouses. It works, but it carries three persistent problems: it is animal-derived, it varies considerably from batch to batch in ways that quietly undermine experimental reproducibility, and it sits uncomfortably with the 3Rs principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement that increasingly shape both academic research and regulatory expectations. Human Platelet Lysate, derived from donated human platelets that would otherwise be discarded, has emerged as the most credible alternative, but each new cell line requires its own evidence base before laboratories can confidently switch over.
What the Utrecht team found is encouraging on all counts. Even at low supplementation levels of around one percent, Human Platelet Lysate supported HTR8/SVneo cells for the full three-week culture window. Cell viability was comparable to the conventional fetal calf serum medium, and cell counts were actually higher in the Human Platelet Lysate condition. The team also tested a fully chemically defined medium with no animal or human supplement at all, and found it was not sufficient on its own to sustain the cells, confirming that a human-derived supplement is the bridge that closes the gap between fully synthetic formulations and serum-supplemented systems.
For PL BioScience, this is more than a single positive result. HTR8/SVneo is a workhorse of placental and reproductive research, used in studies of preeclampsia, pregnancy-related drug exposure, and developmental toxicology across hundreds of laboratories worldwide. Adding rigorous, independent evidence that ELAREM™ can replace fetal calf serum in this cell line extends the company’s evidence base into a new and meaningful application area, and it does so through the kind of arms-length academic validation that carries weight with both regulators and the broader scientific community. It is precisely the kind of progress that drew us to PL BioScience in the first place, and it strengthens the company’s position as the only EU-based commercial-stage Human Platelet Lysate supplier serving researchers and cell therapy manufacturers globally.
The full paper is openly available through Toxicology in Vitro and via the Utrecht University research portal.
