Please keep one thing in mind when you work with primary MM cells. Plasma cells are terminally differentiated, so the basic thing they will do is to die, but they are not supposed to really grow any more.

Giving them a good environment, especially seeding them on stroma cells slows down the apoptosis speed, adding IL-6 usually also helps, but to a worse extend than stroma cells. We seed the primary cells in RPMI1640 medium enriched with 10% FBS, 2 mM L-Glu, Pen/Strep 1%, 1mM Na-Pyru.

Article In the presence of bone marrow stromal cells human multiple ...

This is one of the oldest papers from the group where I am working, around 20 years of experience with primary cells, still we use the protocol today.

I agree with Daniela. The CD138+ cells separated from the bone marrow are very rarely willing to proliferate. Moreover, (this seems to be dependent on donor), they tend to enter apoptosis after 24-48h when cultured in the RPMI medium Daniela mentioned. It is however enough time to perform basic tasks like compound treatment followed by WB/qPCR/FACS. It usually correlates with what I see on the established cell lines.

When i want to support their growth a little longer, I culture them on bone marrow stromal cells. It seems that although they need the cytokines (like IL6), direct contact with stroma is also necessary to support their growth.

Dear Dr Daniela Bruennert and Dr Filip Garbicz Please convey my gratitude to your kind response. The growth of the Multiple myelomas was checked with different culture media (DMEM and RPMI-1640) and different growth factors (Mesenchymal stems cells and stroma cell lysate and born marrow serum). Unfortunately, I could not successes. I will try with your advice

Dear Manoj,

I would recommend to either try these:

fbs-test.de/

or to go for chemically defined media instead.

Best