Heart-on-chip monitoring of cardiomyocyte electrical activity

This method is used to monitor cardiac cell cultures in vitro. It can be used for monitoring both cell activity and drug-induced cardiac side-effects for primary cardiomyocytes or hIPSC-derived cardiomyocytes. Unlike conventional microelectrode array systems that only measure the local field potentials around cardiac cells, the imec-developed microelectrode array monitors the extracellular electrical activity, intracellular (open-cell) action potentials, and impedance of cells cultured directly on the chip. Furthermore, this method offers high throughput recordings of cells: the CMOS-based chip contains 16384 recording electrodes, wherein 1024 channels can simultaneously record multimodal cell electrophysiology on single-cell level. This multimodal MEA may open up new opportunities in high-throughput cell-based pharmacological screening as well as fundamental studies of cells.