(241d) Award Submission: Electronic Platform to Quantify Cellular Mechanisms Associated with Carbon Nanotubes Exposure in Real-Time

Despite the intriguing potential of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for biomedical applications, their implementation is currently being hindered by many uncertainties regarding their toxicity and fate inside the biological systems. Several reports have shown that CNTs toxicity can be attributed to their length, surface chemistry, aggregation and metal impurities, just to name a few. However, due to the various types of CNTs being synthesized every day along with the different surface functionalization techniques, there is no fundamental understanding of the toxicological and pharmacological profiles of cellular systems exposed to CNTs with different physico-chemical properties. In this research, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the cellular behavior of human lung cells post exposure to CNTs using a combination of electronic and cell-based techniques. Our analyses rely on a non-invasive electronic cell impedance sensing (ECIS) platform to provide real-time measurements of cell adhesion, cell-cell interactions as well as changes in cellular morphology upon exposure to CNTs with user-defined physical and chemical properties. The approach is complemented by standard microscopy techniques as well as conventional in vitro cellular-based assays, such as cell cycle analysis, cell proliferation and viability, in order to derive structure-function relations associated with the cytotoxic and apoptotic events induced by exposure to CNTs. Our results correlated the different physico-chemical properties of CNTs with the various biological responses and provided mechanistic insights into their Cyto- and genotoxic effects. Out study help define a novel platform for nanomaterials toxicity analysis and thus could expand the biomedical applications of CNTs and other nanomaterials.