Currently, when adult stem cells are harvested from a patient, they are cultured in the laboratory to increase the initial yield of cells and create a batch of sufficient volume to kick-start the process of cellular regeneration when they are re-introduced back into the patient. The process of culturing is made more difficult by spontaneous stem cell differentiation, where stem cells grown on standard plastic tissue culture surfaces do not expand to create new stem cells but instead create other cells which are of no use in therapy. New findings show that nanoscale patterning is a powerful tool for the non-invasive manipulation of stem cells. Their facile fabrication process employed, a range of thermoplastics that can be processed with exquisite reproducibility down to 5 nm fidelity using injection moulding approaches, offers unique potential for the generation of cell culture platforms for the up-scale of autologous cells for clinical use.