Abstract

On chip two-photon metabolic imaging for drug toxicity testing

Fang Yu, Student, Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology

Optical molecular metabolic imaging methods were developed to investigate the viability and metabolic activities of cells and tissues. We have fabricated a microfluidic system to be incorporated with the metabolic imaging method and monitor the cells cultured in the chip. The cells are perfusion-cultured to mimic the blood flow in vivo, label-free optical measurements of NADH and FAD fluorescence intensity and morphologic changes were assessed non-invasively and compared with the drug toxicity testing results obtained with traditional static well-plate system. We found that our method can accurately monitor the cell viability and drug response, the IC50 value obtained from imaging analysis is more accurate compared with biochemical assays like MTS assay due to the interference of some drug solution with colour. Thus, our method could serve as a reliable criteria to do long term drug screening and testing as well as enabling continuous monitoring of in vitro cultured cells and tissue.