Isolation and Culture of Human Neural Stem Cells

A major hurdle in brain tumor therapy development is a lack of adequate controls to ensure therapeutic safety in human patients. Neural stem cells (NSCs) are healthy brain cells that are commonly used by neurobiologists and neuroscientists as controls for therapy development. Consequently, it is important that these cells are properly isolated and cultured to maintain cell integrity to efficiently uncover potential toxicities associated with developing therapies for downstream applications, including omics studies. In this chapter, we describe the optimized techniques for the isolation, acquisition, and maintenance of NSCs from fetal brain samples. For further details on the use of this protocol, please refer to Suk et al. (STAR Protoc 3:101628. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.XPRO.2022.101628, 2022).