Integrated Sensors for Organ-on-Chip Platforms

Abstract

Organs-on-Chip (OoC) has been an advancing biotechnological field for the last two decades. By combining engineering and biology, OoC technology makes it possible to mimic the in-vivo behavior of human organs to investigate personalized medicine and disease modeling in-vitro.
Integrating sensors into cell cultures is crucial since the well-being of the culture needs to be monitored in real-time and without compromising cell viability. Monitoring the pH level of the micro-environment is particularly important since it is an indicator of homeostasis for the cell well-being and products of cell metabolism can cause changes in pH, reflecting certain disease phenotypes.
In this work, the integration of electrochemical sensors into OoC devices was shown. The sensors are based on a floating-gate field-effect transistor (FG-FET), a variation of a common active electronic component, and are sensitive to local electric charge. The active component provides inherent amplification, which translates to higher sensitivity and resolution for smaller changes from segregated analytes. The FG-FET was capacitively coupled to two control-gates to determine the working point of the transistor. The sensing area (FG extension) was separated fromthe active FET area to ease the handling of analytes. When there is a net charge in close proximity to the extension of the FG, it induces a change in the formation of the channel of the transistor. This change can be monitored by the drain current....