A group from the Center for Child Health and Development described a regenerative medicine approach to thin endometrium (endometrial stunting), which is one of causes of infertility.
https://stemcellres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13287-021-02188-x
There are various causes of infertility, but one of them is a thin endometrium (endometrial stunting). It is known that thin endometrium make ovoimplantation difficult, but little is known about the reason. Treatments for endometrial stunting include (1)estradiol replacement, mineral and vitamin administration, and from regenerative medicine approaches, (2) administration of platelet-rich plasma, (3) menstruation-derived stem cells, and (4) use of autologous transplantation of exogenously prepared endometrium cell sheets.
In a regenerative medicine approach, however, it would be very important how efficiently to culture the endometrium under xeno-free conditions. The endometrium is basically difficult to culture with feeder-free, and from the view point of xeno-free, the authors have developed a method of using autologous endometrial stromal cells as a feeder instead of MEF. They also used special media (ESTEM-HE) in terms of accelerating endometrial cell growth. In the figure below, continental medium is DMEM and epithelium-specific medium is a special medium named ESTEM-HE.
