MEMS Device to Monitor Biological Oxygen Uptake at Arrays of Single Cells and Small Cell Clusters

Electrochemical mapping of oxygenation in the three-dimensional multicellular tumour hemi-spheroid

Blood capillaries deliver oxygen and nutrients to surrounding micro-regions of tissue and carry away metabolic waste. In normal tissue, capillaries are close enough to keep all the cells viable. In solid tumours, the capillary system is chaotic and typical inter-capillary distances are larger than in normal tissue. Therefore, hypoxic regions develop. Drug molecules may not reach these areas at concentrations above the lethal level. The combined effect of low drug concentrations and local hypoxia, often exacerbated by acidity, leads to therapy failure. To better understand the interplay between hypoxia and poor drug penetration, oxygenation needs to be assessed in different areas of inter-capillary tissue. The multicellular tumour spheroid is a well-established three-dimensional (3D) in vitro model of the capillary microenvironment. It is used to mimic nascent tumours and micro-metastases as well. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time that dynamic intra-spheroidal oxygen maps can be obtained at the 3D multicellular tumour hemi-spheroid (MCH) using a non-invasive microelectrode array. The same oxygen distributions exist inside the equivalent but less accessible full spheroid. The MCH makes high throughput-high content analysis of spheroids feasible and thus can assist studies on basic cancer biology, drug development and personalized medicine.

Differential linear scan voltammetry: analytical performance in comparison with pulsed voltammetry techniques

We report here on differential linear scan voltammetry, DLSV, that combines the working principles of linear scan voltammetry, LSV, and the numerous existing pulsed voltammetry techniques. DLSV preserves the information from continuous interrogation in voltage and high accuracy that LSV provides about electrochemical processes, and the much better sensitivity of differential pulsed techniques. DLSV also minimizes the background current compared to both LSV and pulsed voltammetry. An early version of DLSV, derivative stationary electrode polarography, DSEP, had been proposed in the 1960s but soon abandoned in favor of the emerging differential pulsed techniques. Relative to DSEP, DLSV takes advantage of the flexibility of discrete smoothing differentiation that was not available to early investigators. Also, DSEP had been explored in pure solutions and with reversible electrochemical reactions. DLSV is tested in this work in more challenging experimental contexts: the measurement of oxygen with a carbon fiber microelectrode in buffer, and with a gold microdisc electrode exposed to a live biological preparation. This work compares the analytical performance of DLSV and square wave voltammetry, the most popular pulsed voltammetry technique.