I have done fibroblast culture from tendon biopsy samples and from nerve biopsy samples. The cells grow slowly. You are are doing correctly. Only change you can do that: keep less medium in dish so that biopsy pieces are just covered with medium and are not dipped in medium. In this way pieces are more likely to stay near bottom of dish rather than floating in the medium.that gives more surface for tissue to grow cells. You may change medium carefully not to detach from dish.

Thanks for the advice. Have you tried mincing the biopsy and then leave it on the dish for a 20-30 mins in the incubator without media to allow for attachment and then adding the media? I am asking because I have read a few forums describing this approach but mainly for skin biopsies.

I would suggest enzymatically digesting your minced tissue in a combination of two enzymes: type-1 collagenase (Worthington) and dispase (R&D Laboratories). Then plating the digested tissue in your complete medium on bare plastic for 12 hours at 37C. Telomerase negative fibroblasts should attach in that time frame.

Next, to induce proliferation of your fibroblasts, I would suggest you add PDGF-BB (R&D Laboratories) in base medium containing heat-inactivated serum (Atlas Biologicals, Fort Collins, CO). We used 10 ng/ml PDGF-BB for our telomerase positive stem cells in Opti-MEN + Glutamax (GIBCO) with 10% HI-FBS (Atlas Biologicals), pH 7.4 at 37C, so I suspect you will need to titrate the concentration of PDGF-BB that maximizes proliferation of your cells. Also remember, that as your cells increase in number you will need to feed your cultures more often if you expect survival.