Organic semiconductor-based systems for the simultaneous recording of the electrical and metabolic activity of in vitro cellular aggregates
Andrea Spanu a, Laura Martines a b, Fabio Terranova b, Mariateresa Tedesco b, Leandro Lorenzelli c, Sergio Martinoia b, Annalisa Bonfiglio a
a University of Cagliari, Piazza d'Armi, Cagliari, Italy
b University of Genova, Via Dodecaneso, 35, Genova, Italy
c Bruno Kessler Foundation
Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MATSUS)
Proceedings of nanoGe Spring Meeting 2022 (NSM22)
#FUN-OrgBio22. Fundamentals of Organic Bioelectronic Devices
Online, Spain, 2022 March 7th - 11th
Organizers: Eleni Stavrinidou and Annalisa Bonfiglio
Contributed talk, Andrea Spanu, presentation 355
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.nsm.2022.355
Publication date: 7th February 2022

In vitro monitoring of electrogenic cells represents a very interesting approach in different scientific fields such as neuroengineering, pharmacology, and potentially also translational medicine. One of the key aspects of all cellular cultures, and this is particularly true for standard electrogenic cell cultures, as well as for cardiac organoids and neurospheroids, is their complexity, mainly due to the different kinds of both chemical and electrical signals that characterize their response to external stimuli and that ultimately govern their behavior. During the past 50 years, this extraordinary complexity pushed the research community to develop increasingly complex devices and tools with the idea of fully exploiting all the different aspects of these multiparametric systems. To the aim of providing a simple and integrated approach for the study of in vitro electrogenic cultures, and thus offer a potentially simpler solution to the monitoring of different cellular features, we present here an organic transistor-based device capable of measuring two of the most important cellular parameters, namely the electrical and the metabolic activity, using the ultra-sensitive Organic Charge Modulated FET (OCMFET). The OCMFET, thanks to its peculiar structure and outstanding versatility, can be conveniently engineered in order to meet the desired sensing needs, ultimately allowing to obtain multisensing and multisite tools capable of simultaneously recording the aforementioned parameters using a single type of organic transistor, differently from other existing approaches. The device, called Micro OCMFET Array (MOA), has been tested using primary cardiac rat myocytes, and allowed to evaluate the metabolic and electrical variations that occur upon the administration of different drugs. Although preliminary, these results demonstrate the very interesting potentials of organic transistors in this highly complex and multifaceted scientific field, thus laying the basis for the development of a multi-sensing tool for the in vitro monitoring of cell aggregates. As a future perspective, the possibility of obtaining MOA devices with 3D recording sites will also be addressed. This capability, together with the already-mentioned versatility of the system, may represent a potentially game-changing feature within the rising field of in vitro organoid studies.

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