Cytocentric Visionaries: Roger Rönn

This is a five-part series of blog posts containing excerpts from an interview that Dr. Alicia Henn, Chief Scientific Officer of BioSpherix, conducted with Roger Rönn, who is finishing his PhD at Lund University. Our conversation on protecting cells from reactive oxygen species (ROS) was edited for brevity and clarity.

In the last post, Roger told us about ways that he has identified to control ROS levels in cell cultures. Today, we discuss what factors keep researchers from limiting the ROS exposure of cells.

What keeps people from taking steps to control ROS in cell cultures?

RR: Well, it’s easy to take for granted that the techniques and methods we use in the lab are optimized and perfected. Anyone who works in our profession goes through the same courses and gets told what people before you have done and what’s working for them. You kind of take for granted that that’s the best way to do it.

Ever since cell culture started, people have mostly cultured their cells at 21% oxygen. If you move away from what is the gold standard, you have to justify it. So it’s a lot of work to try to change something that you don’t know is going to pay off. People are set in their ways.

If you culture fibroblasts or more sturdy cell types, these cells are fine, so you can still do your experiments. But the thing that makes it so hard to work with hematopoietic stem cells is that they are so sensitive. The same assumption that it’s fine to work at 21% oxygen isn’t necessarily valid when you work with these types of cells.

And also many labs don’t want to consider the possibility that what they have done for a long period of time, at least to some extent, could be rendered invalid or less reliable. Or that the culture conditions that they took for granted could actually be a cause of error.

So, there is a history-dependence to the work of individual labs?

RR: If people do the same set of experiments that they’ve already done in different conditions, the results that they saw in the first condition might not be the same. So it’s a big thing to change your standard culture condition, that’s why people don’t want to do it.

I would also say that people don’t like to do this because it’s an inconvenience. If you want to work with conditions that are low in O₂, similar to what you find in the body, it’s harder to work with the equipment that is standardized in labs today.

You mean non-oxygen-controlled equipment?

RR: Our open hood systems, our 5% CO2 but 21% O₂ incubators, much of the equipment that we have, needs to be replaced. There’s already a lot of money being spent on chemicals and cell culture media, etc. It’s not always a popular thing to suggest we need to change our equipment.

Do you think there is any awareness in the broader stem cell scientific community about the issue of oxygen exposure to stem cells?

RR: What I felt at the conference [ISSCR 2015] more than ever, I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was, but with many small signs, it feels like the field is beginning to change opinion. I get the feeling that we might be entering a time of change in regard to more physiological conditions for cell culture.

In the next post, we talk with Roger about terminology like normoxia and physioxia, and HSC. If you would like you and your work to be featured in the Cytocentric Visionary series, please contact us here and tell us how your work fits the Cytocentric Principles.

 Roger Rönn interview: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5