Miniaturized In Vitro Electrical Stimulation Platform

Resumen del trabajo presentado en la 31st Annual Conference of the European Society for Biomaterials, celebrada virtualmente del 5 al 9 de septiembre de 2021Bioelectricity facilitates sending and receiving information to/from the body to provide controlling and feedbacking ºystems to regulate, and monitor biological microenvironment. Also, numerous studies showed electrical stimulation (ES) promotes proliferation, migration and secretion of pro-regenerative factors in the cells and accelerates tissue regeneration, and wound healing. Moreover, ES has a great potential to be adapted as a digital medicine and/or smart therapeutic. Growing research on the use of ES in biological systems, promotes development of in vitro platforms to study the role and applications of ES in contact with cells and tissues. Up to now several in vitro ES devices has been established, such as: devices for measuring electrical impedance of cells that is used to evaluate specific biological activities; devices for inducing specific cell responses by means of low voltage ES (e.g., cell migration, differentiation); devices for stimulating and/or recording electrical activity of electroactive cells in CMOS-based multi-electrode arrays (MEAs) and/or multipurpose setups such as lab-on-the-chip. Nevertheless, quality of electrical signals, reproducibility of experiments, increasing of throughput and accuracy of performance of current in vitro platforms are yet to be improved. We believe, advances in biomaterials technology, computational modelling, microelectronics, microfabrication, and electrochemistry have opened new doors to meet these needs. Here we present the evolution of in vitro platforms for electrical stimulation and recording for different proposes and introduce our innovative device for low voltage direct electrical stimulation. We discussed design, fabrication and characterization of this platform and its benefits for conducting high throughput and controlled experiments within a standard cell culture vessel