SBIR Phase I: Fully Screen Printed Electric Cell-Substrate Impedance Sensing Toxicity Assay

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to develop a new product testing tool to evaluate potential human toxicity of products in development. Current practices that test a product’s effects on humans consist of lengthy, expensive, and harmful animal studies. Given the cost, many animal toxicity screenings often happen in later product development stages – at which point millions of development dollars have already been spent.

Major financial losses follow unfavorable screening results. Specifically, this technology will be developed with the intention to not only save millions of dollars downstream, but also maintain animal welfare and ethics in the product development process across industries. Compared to the current market offerings by others, this novel cell toxicity assay is intuitive and easy to manage with respect to time and the number of samples, while providing a rapid, accurate assessment. The global toxicology testing market is projected to reach $14.4 billion by 2025.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is aimed at developing a novel, scalable in vitro toxicity assay that leverages a cellular-electrode interface bioprinting technology. Toxicological testing occurs toward the end of product development of a drug or consumer product after millions of dollars have already been poured into R&D.

These in vivo screens are expensive, harmful to animals, and have the potential to kill products after years of pre-market development. Bioprinting has emerged as a promising new approach for biofabricating models and systems for in vitro toxicology screening in an attempt to address the ethical and financial burden aforementioned. Yet, despite revolutionary potential, traditional bioprinting has technical and commercial drawbacks (e.g. cell damage, low throughput, high cost, inflexible).

This proposal is designed to address those drawbacks by developing 1) a novel method to biofabricate tissues using an innovative bioprinting technique and 2) an integration of electrode sensors to quantitatively measure cell health and viability via electrical signal output correlations. Experimental success of tissue fabrication and electrode-cellular measurements will be determined by greater than 80% of cellular viability following novel bioprinting method and a correlation value of r> 0.6 between electrical impedance readings and canonical molecular toxicity analyses.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.