An On-line, Multi-Parametric, Multi-Channel Physicochemical Monitoring Platform for Stem Cell Culture Bioprocessing

This paper describes the development of a novel physiological platform aiming at the on-line, in-situ, multi-parametric, multi-channel, physicochemical, spatiotemporal monitoring of stem cell cultures. The three main operational components are: a) miniaturized electro-chemical (bio)sensors; b) real-time data acquisition system tailored to the sensor interfacing requirements and c) the bioreactor within which the stem cells are growing. It is believed that the totality of the platform constitutes a novel technological modality for the bioprocess engineer and can contribute to the harnessing of the potential of stem cells by enabling and/or facilitating the identification and classification of their proliferation and differentiation paths. This paper places emphasis upon the electronic hardware and software parts of the proposed "intelligent stem cell culture systems" (ISCCS). The hardware of the measurement system is organized into three types of modules each capable of 16-channel realtime data acquisition. The three types of modules correspond to potentiometric, amperometric and ohmic types of sensors. The platform can support an arbitrary combination of such modules up to the number of eight, thus enabling the realization of a flexible and versatile system capable of providing up to 128 data acquisition channels for the physiological monitoring of the stem cell culture process. In other words, the measurement equipment can be configured to interface with up to eight different types of sensors each sensor monitoring a physiological quantity of relevance (e.g. glucose, lactate, ammonia, oxygen, pH etc.) each quantity measured concurrently by 16 on-line channels over the space occupied by the cell culture in the bioreactor (spatiotemporal physiological monitoring). The whole measurement system is PC-based with its application software developed in Lab VIEW since it provides a friendly user interface for hardware configuration and setting measurement parameter while at the same time facilitating the acquisition, display and management of different types of sensed data in real-time. Both the hardware and software aspects of the new measurement system are elaborated in this paper. Other aspects of the ISCCS platform relating to both the sensors and the bioreactor are also discussed. Moreover results are reported and the whole system is illustrated in detail.