Technique for real-time measurements of endothelial permeability in a microfluidic membrane chip using laser-induced fluorescence detection.

Characterizing permeability of the endothelium that lines blood vessels and heart valves provides fundamental physiological information and is required to evaluate uptake of drugs and other biomolecules. However, current techniques used to measure permeability, such as Transwell insert assays, do not account for the recognized effects of fluid flow-induced shear stress on endothelial permeability or are inherently low-throughput. Here we report a novel on-chip technique in a two-layer membrane-based microfluidic platform to measure real-time permeability of endothelial cell monolayers on porous membranes. Bovine serum albumin (a model protein) conjugated with fluorescein isothiocyanate was delivered to an upper microchannel by pressure-driven flow and was forced to permeate a poly(ethylene terephthalate) membrane into a lower microchannel, where it was detected by laser-induced fluorescence. The concentration of the permeate at the point of detection varied with channel flow rates in agreement to less than 1% with theoretical analyses using a pore flow model. On the basis of the model, a sequential flow rate stepping scheme was developed and applied to obtain the permeability of cell-free and cell-bound membrane layers. This technique is a highly sensitive, novel microfluidic approach for measuring endothelial permeability in vitro, and the use of micrometer-sized channels offers the potential for parallelization and increased throughput compared to conventional shear-based permeability measurement methods.