NanoLiterBioReactor: Monitoring of Long-Term Mammalian Cell Physiology at Nanofabricated Scale
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NanoLiterBioReactor: Monitoring of Long-Term Mammalian Cell Physiology at Nanofabricated Scale Ales Prokop1,2, Zdenka Prokop1, David Schaffer3, Eugene Kozlov2, John Wikswo4,5, David Cliffel6, Franz Baudenbacher4 1 NanoDelivery, Inc., Nashville, TN 37211, 2Chemical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, 3Mechanical Engineering, 4Biomedical Engineering, 5Physics and Astronomy, 6Chemistry Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract There is a need for microminiaturized cell-culture environments, i.e., NanoLiter BioReactors (NBRs), for growing and maintaining populations of up to several hundred cultured mammalian cells in volumes three orders of magnitude smaller than those contained in standard multi-well screening plates. Reduced NBR volumes would not only shorten the time required for diffusive mixing, for achieving thermal equilibrium, and for cells to grow to confluence, but also simplify accurate cell counting, minimize required volumes of expensive analytical pharmaceuticals or toxins, and allow for thousands of culture chambers on a single instrumented chip. These devices would enable the development of a new class of miniature, automated cellbased bioanalysis arrays for monitoring the immediate environment of multiple cell lines and assessing the effects of drug or toxin exposure. The challenge, beyond that of optimizing the NBR physically, is to detect cellular response, provide appropriate control signals, and, eventually, facilitate closed-loop adjustments of the environment--e.g., to control temperature, pH, ionic concentration, etc., to maintain homeostasis, or to apply drugs or toxins followed by the adaptive administration of a selective toxin antidote. To characterize in a nonspecific manner the metabolic activity of cells, the biosensor elements of the NBR might include planar pH, dissolved oxygen, and redox potential sensors, or even an isothermal picocalorimeter (pC) to monitor thermodynamic response. Equipped with such sensors, the NBR could be used to perform short- and long-term cultivation of several mammalian cell lines in a perfused system, and to monitor their response to analytes in a massively parallel format. This approach will enable automated, parallel, and multiphasic monitoring of multiple cell lines for drug and toxicology screening. An added bonus is the possibility of studying cell populations with low cell counts whose constituents are completely detached from typical tissue environment, or populations in controlled physical and chemical gradients. We fabricated NBR prototypes, each of which incorporates a culture chamber, inlet and outlet ports, and connecting microfluidic conduits. The fluidic components were molded in PDMS using soft-lithography techniques, and sealed via plasma activation against a glass slide, which served as the primary culture substrate in the NBR. The input and outlet ports were punched into the PDMS block, and enabled the supply and withdrawal of culture medium into/from the culture chamber (10-100 nL volume)
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