The use of high throughput screening (HTS) in drug development is principally for the selection new drug candidates or screening of chemical toxicants. This system minimizes the experimental environment and allows for the screening of candidates at the same time. Umbilical cord-derived stem cells have some of the characteristics of fetal stem cell and have several advantages such as the ease with which they can be obtained and lack of ethical issues. To establish a HTS system, optimized conditions that mimic typical cell culture conditions in a minimal space such as 96 well plates are needed for stem cell growth. We have thus established a novel HTS system using human umbilical cord derived-mesenchymal stem cells (hUC-MSCs). To determine the optimal cell number, hUC-MSCs were serially diluted and seeded at 750, 500, 200 and 100 cells per well on 96 well plates. The maintenance efficiencies of these dilutions were compared for 3, 7, 9, and 14 days. The fetal bovine serum (FBS) concentration (20, 10, 5 and 1%) and the cell numbers (750, 500 and 200 cells/well) were compared for 3, 5 and 7 days. In addition, we evaluated the optimal conditions for cell cycle block. These four independent optimization experiments were conducted using an MTT assay. In the results, the optimal conditions for a HTS system using hUC-MSCs were determined to be 300 cell/well cultured for 8 days with 1 or 5% FBS. In addition, we demonstrated that the optimal conditions for a cell cycle block in this culture system are 48 hours in the absence of FBS. In addition, we candidates using our HTS system which demonstrates the feasibility if using hUC-MSCs for this type of screen. Moreover, the four candidate compounds can be tested for stem cell research application.

• Jaejin Cho(Lab of Dental Regenerative Biotechnology Major, School of Dentistry, Seoul National University, Dental Research Institute, Seoul National University) Corresponding author
• Eu Gene Park(Lab of Dental Regenerative Biotechnology Major, School of Dentistry, Seoul National University, Dental Research Institute, Seoul National University)
• Taejun Cho(Lab of Dental Regenerative Biotechnology Major, School of Dentistry, Seoul National University, Dental Research Institute, Seoul National University)
• Keunhee Oh(Department of Biomedical Science, School of Medicine, Seoul National University)
• Soon-Keun Kwon(Lab of Dental Regenerative Biotechnology Major, School of Dentistry, Seoul National University, Dental Research Institute, Seoul National University)
• Dong-Sup Lee(Department of Biomedical Science, School of Medicine, Seoul National University)
• Seung Bum Park(Department of Chemistry, Seoul National University)