Activation of FGF/FGFR signaling pathway is also known to be important in organoid cultures. However, proper selection of different FGFR ligands for each organ type is necessary while organoid culture, complicating experimental set up and execution. Therefore, using the universal FGFR ligand “FGF-1”, which shows highly affinity to all the type of FGFR, is expected to be a simple and convenient method for organoid culture. However, FGF-1 is known to be thermally unstable, and at 37°C, which cell-culture is normally being held, the bio-activity is lost within 6 hours, including in the presence of heparin. These factors results in commercially available FGF1 being unable to be used in culture studies.

To solve the problem, MBL provides FGF-Max, a universal FGFR ligand which the thermal stability is highly enhanced by chimerizing FGF-1 and FGF-2.