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For the next installment in our miniseries on trouble with suppliers, today we have a guest post from Krystal Evans. Enjoy! And please get in touch if you have a story of your own to tell.

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One of the reasons I came to the UK to learn how to do stem cell culture, is that our lab in Melbourne ran into trouble trying to replicate published protocols.

We had set up an effective cell culture system, but then it just stopped working. Cells were dying; cells were refusing to grow; cells wouldn’t differentiate—and we couldn’t work out what was wrong. We began to doubt if we’d ever really had it working in the first place, and grew increasingly frustrated with the phrase “But it used to work!”

The cells are grown in an expensive stem cell medium (~£250 for 500 mL), which is then supplemented with a complex mix of other ingredients. The company that makes the medium told us they hadn’t changed anything, so we assumed that wasn’t the problem. So we then proceeded to individually troubleshoot the entire cocktail of ingredients, using a cell culture system that takes three weeks to give a result.

Months and months went by—is it the cytokines? is it the lipids? is the antibiotics?—and we still couldn’t get our cells to grow like they used to. Was it the plastic ware? Was it the incubator? Was it the gas mix? We lost over a year trying to work out what was going wrong, and in the end the project went on hold. Which is a terrible situation for grants, fellowships, publications and lab morale.

There is a culture (no pun intended) in science of not wanting to admit it when you’ve got technical problems in the lab. Science is such a competitive environment that researchers are often reluctant to share such information. This can happen at a lab level, but what happens when it’s more of a global issue? Because as it turned out, labs in England, France, the Netherlands and Australia were all having identical problems in getting their stem cell cultures to grow. But it took a long time before they started talking to each other about it. I only found out when I accepted that I wasn’t able to get the stem cell cultures to work in Melbourne, and I contacted the experts here in the UK to ask if I could come to visit them to learn how they do it.

And yes, it was the stem cell culture medium. And company representatives had told researchers in each lab that they hadn’t changed the recipe, and that their product couldn’t be the source of all our experimental woes. Talking to other researchers reassured me, as we had all had the same experience over the same timeframe. But it also frustrated me that the company had been getting all this negative feedback, from labs all over the world, without once admitting that there could be a problem with their product.

So I’ve come to the UK and worked with labs here who have altered their protocols by switching to a new medium, and guess what? It works.

Yesterday, on the final day of my experiments here in the UK, I was so excited to see that my stem cells had correctly, beautifully and efficiently become reticulocytes. I hadn’t seen this result in Melbourne in over a year, and it was a sight for sore eyes!

I can’t wait to get home, order some media from this new company and demand a refund for all the bottles of media in the freezer from the original company. And I will never order from them again.

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Dr Krystal Evans is a malaria research scientist, working at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Australia. She is a regular science presenter on the Melbourne community radio station 3RRR and an active science advocate with the Australian “Discoveries Need Dollars” campaign.

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