Endothelial cells line blood vessels and coordinate many aspects of vascular biology. More recent work has shown that endothelial cells provide a key niche in vivo for neural stem cells. In vitro, endothelial cells secrete a factor that expands neural stem cells while inhibiting their differentiation. Here, we show that a transformed mouse endothelial cell line (bEnd.3) maintains human pluripotent stem cells in an undifferentiated state. bEnd.3 cells have a practical advantage over mouse embryonic fibroblasts for pluripotent stem cell maintenance since they can be expanded in vitro and engineered to express genes of interest. We demonstrate this capability by producing fluorescent and drug-resistant feeder cells. Further, we show that bEnd.3 secretes an activity that maintains human embryonic stem cells without direct contact.
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