About Primary Cells

Primary cells refers to the cells that are directly isolated from living tissues. They can be cultured in an artificial environment and established for growth in vitro. Primary cells can be isolated from most tissues and organs, such as brain, colon, bone, blood vessel, heart, epithelium, connective tissue, muscle tissue and nervous tissue. However, there are differences in growth rate, isolation method and culture difficulty among different primary cells.

Compared with the continuous cell lines, primary cells are most closely to the tissue of origin, thus are more representative models to the in vivo state. However, they have limited life span and are more difficult to culture in vitro.

Applications of Primary Cells

Primary cells can retain normal morphology, growth characteristics, cellular markers, functions, and genetic integrity. Therefore, they are widely used in molecular biology, cell biology and biomedical basic research, such as proteomics, genomics, cell research, and genetic research. Not only that, they are also ideal cell models used in biopharmaceutics, such as the study of disease mechanisms, drug screening, drug metabolism, toxicology research, cancer drug research, and therapeutic development.

Primary cells can provide excellent models to study the effects of drugs and toxic compounds. Primary cells from different species can be used to varify the potential differences between species used in preclinical trials and the accuracy of extrapolating human data from animal models.