Bioimpedance Measurements on Human Neural Stem Cells as a Benchmark for the Development of Smart Mobile Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, stem cell technologies matured from an attractive option to investigate neurodegenerative diseases to a possible paradigm shift in their treatment through the development of cell-based regenerative medicine (CRM). Implantable cell replacement therapies promise to completely restore function of neural structures possibly changing how we currently perceive the onset of these conditions. One of the major clinical hurdles facing the routine implementation of stem cell therapy is the limited and inconsistent benefit observed thus far. While unclear, numerous pre-clinical and a handful of clinical cell fate imaging studies point to poor cell retention and survival. Coupling the need to better understand these mechanisms while providing scalable approaches to monitor these treatments in both pre-clinical and clinical scenarios, we show a proof of concept bioimpedance electronic platform for the Agile development of smart and mobile biomedical applications like neural implants or highly portable monitoring devices.

Development of a Smart Wireless Multisensor Platform for an Optogenetic Brain Implant

“…Cell proliferation can be monitored by the miniaturized instrument with no reduction in quality. A full characterization of the sensing circuit was performed, and published and preliminary tests and cell measurements were reported using an early prototype [ 37 ]. Performance measurements in this new iteration can be checked in the Figure A9 .…”

“…These units have been developed in parallel, and some proof-of-concept performance studies have been performed before [ 37 ]. In this paper, we show a pre-clinical application focused on impedance and electrochemical measurements on in vitro cell cultures and respective control measurements.…”

“…In a previous report, we were able to obtain promising preliminary results [ 37 ]. In this iteration, we improved the circuit to make use of a dual PWM (pulse width modulation) system to significantly expand the frequency range from previously 10 Hz to 100 kHz to currently 10 Hz to 300 kHz with a 32 mV sine wave excitation signal.…”