thumb|WI-38 cells (Left: in high density. Right: in low density) WI-38 is a diploid human cell line composed of fibroblasts derived from lung tissue of a 3-month-gestation female fetus. The fetus came from a legal abortion performed in Sweden in 1962. The cell line was isolated by Leonard Hayflick the same year, and has been used extensively in scientific research, with applications ranging from developing important theories in molecular biology and aging to the production of most human virus vaccines. The uses of this cell line in human virus vaccine production is estimated to have saved the
thumb|WI-38 cells (Left: in high density. Right: in low density) WI-38 is a diploid human cell line composed of fibroblasts derived from lung tissue of a 3-month-gestation female fetus. The fetus came from a legal abortion performed in Sweden in 1962. The cell line was isolated by Leonard Hayflick the same year, and has been used extensively in scientific research, with applications ranging from developing important theories in molecular biology and aging to the production of most human virus vaccines. The uses of this cell line in human virus vaccine production is estimated to have saved the lives of millions of people.
==History== The WI-38 cell line stemmed from earlier work by Hayflick growing human cell cultures.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).