Background:

Pharmaceutical toxicology studies include testing the effects of drugs on metabolic processes inside cells. Current state of the art involves extracting the contents of cells, which requires killing each cell sample and repetition of up to 100 independent experiments.   Despite this inefficiency, metabolic testing and toxicology are routinely employed by pharmaceutical companies in preclinical studies of new chemical entities. Non-invasive assays of primary human cells would be faster, more efficient, and more representative of in vivo metabolism. 

To solve this problem, researchers and engineers have spent years to develop a bioreactor which could be placed inside of NMR or MRI systems to assay metabolism in living cell cultures. Such first-generation bioreactors, which are not commercially available, are compatible only with the larger 10-25mm NMR coils and require 100-200 million immortalized cells, effectively preventing use with rare or valuable cell types such as stem cells, primary cells and tissues, or patient biopsies.  Smaller NMR-compatible bioreactors would allow in vivo metabolic studies on living cultures of stem cells, primary cells and tissues, and biopsies and open the door for a variety of new applications.   

Description:

UCSF investigators have developed and tested a new miniaturized NMR-compatible bioreactor. This device can be used to place live cells and tissues inside the 5mm coil of a standard high-resolution NMR spectrometer. The UCSF bioreactor is compatible with any standard NMR spectrometer and can be used to assay metabolism in small volumes of valuable primary cells, stem cells, or patient biopsies in real time. The system was designed for the stringent requirements of NMR, but it is fully compatible with other non-invasive imaging modalities, including PET, SPECT and fluorescence. 

The UCSF 5mm bioreactor currently requires only 5-10 million cells and performs better than 10-25mm bioreactors. Compared to larger bioreactors, the UCSF 5mm bioreactor produces NMR spectra with improved signal to noise ratios and sharper peaks. Cells remain healthy and proliferative and cultures have less than 1% apoptotic cells. The bioreactor can be completely sterilized and re-used or could be a consumable bench-top device where the chamber can be replaced.

File Number: 20838 

Web site: http://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/...