In Vitro Characterization of Adipose Stem Cells Non-Enzymatically Extracted from the Thigh and Abdomen

Autologous fat grafting is a surgical technique in which adipose tissue is transferred from one area of the body to another, in order to reconstruct or regenerate damaged or injured tissues. Before reinjection, adipose tissue needs to be purified from blood and cellular debris to avoid inflammation and preserve the graft viability. To perform this purification, different enzymatic and mechanical methods can be used. In this study, we characterized in vitro the product of a closed automatic device based on mechanical disaggregation, named Rigenera^®, focusing on two sites of adipose tissue harvesting. At first, we optimized the Rigenera^® operating timing, demonstrating that 60 s of treatment allows a higher cellular yield, in terms of the cell number and growth rate. This result optimizes the mechanical disaggregation and it can increase the clinical efficiency of the final product. When comparing the extracted adipose samples from the thigh and abdomen, our results showed that the thigh provides a higher number of mesenchymal-like cells, with a faster replication rate and a higher ability to form colonies. We can conclude that by collecting adipose tissue from the thigh and treating it with the Rigenera^® device for 60 s, it is possible to obtain the most efficient product.