eng Science and Education Publishing Biomedical Science and Engineering 2014-02-12 2 1 5 12 10.12691/bse-2-1-2 BSE2014212 article Partha S. Saha p.s.saha.11@aberdeen.ac.uk 1 Michael Doran 2 Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium School of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Health, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia Regenerative medicine includes two efficient techniques, namely tissue-engineering and cell-based therapy in order to repair tissue damage efficiently. Most importantly, huge numbers of autologous cells are required to deal these practices. Nevertheless, primary cells, from autologous tissue, grow very slowly while culturing in vitro; moreover, they lose their natural characteristics over prolonged culturing period. Transforming growth factors-beta (TGF-¦) is a ubiquitous protein found biologically in its latent form, which prevents it from eliciting a response until conversion to its active form. In active form, TGF-¦ acts as a proliferative agent in many cell lines of mesenchymal origin in vitro. This article reviews on some of the important activation methods-physiochemical, enzyme-mediated, non-specific protein interaction mediated, and drug-induced- of TGF-¦, which may be established as exogenous factors to be used in culturing medium to obtain extensive proliferation of primary cells. http://pubs.sciepub.com/bse/2/1/2/bse-2-1-2.pdf latent TGF-¦ activationextensive cell cultureexogenous factorshMSC proliferationbioreactor