IMSIS: An Instrumented Microphysiological System with Integrated Sensors for Monitoring Cellular Metabolic Activities

Well plates are widely used in biological experiments, particularly in pharmaceutical sciences and cell biology. Its popularity stems from its versatility to support a variety of fluorescent markers for high throughput monitoring of cellular activities. However, using fluorescent markers in traditional well plates has its own challenges, namely, they can be potentially toxic to cells, and thus, may perturb their biological functions; and it is difficult to monitor multiple analytes concurrently and in real-time inside each well. This paper presents a fully instrumented microphysiological system with integrated sensors (IMSIS) with a similar well format. Each well in the microphysiological system has a set of sensors for monitoring multiple metabolic analytes in real-time. The IMSIS platform is supported by integrated bioelectronic circuits and a graphical user interface for easy user configuration and monitoring. The system has integrated microfluidics to maintain its microphysiological environment within each well. The IMSIS platform currently incorporates O