Abstract

3D-printed Microbioreactor with Integrated Impedance Spectroscopy for Cell Barrier Monitoring

georg linz, , DWI Leibniz-Institut for Interactive Materials

Today's cell culture experiments often suffer from the limited commercially available housings for flow culture experiments. In recent years additive manufacturing helped researchers to design cell culture bioreactors with integrated online analytics. We present a novel 3D-printed bioreactor enabling epithelial cell culture experiments under homogeneous flow conditions and online barrier monitoring with four integrated electrodes for electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS).
Transparent indium tin oxide (ITO)-glass as current-injecting electrodes allow direct visualization of the cells and EIS measurement simultaneously. The bioreactor's design takes the importance of homogeneous electric fields into account by placing the voltage pick-up electrodes in the homogeneous electrical field. Subsequent equivalent electric circuit fitting of the impedance data results in cell layer resistance and capacitance.

In the first part of the talk, the bioreactor's design will be presented, including a Comsol simulation of the fluid and electrical fields. In the second part, cultivation results will be shown where epithelial Caco-2 cells were cultivated, and EIS monitored the reaction of the cell layer to different chemicals that alter the cell layer physiology.