Intracellular cardiomyocytes potential recording by planar electrode array and fibroblasts co-culturing on multi-modal CMOS chip

Intracellular action potential signals reveal enriched physiological information. Patch clamp techniques have been widely used to measure intracellular potential. Despite their high signal fidelity, they suffer from low throughput. Recently, 3D nanoelectrodes have been developed for intracellular potential recording. However, they are limited by scalability, yield, and cost, directly constraining their use in monitoring large number of cells and high throughput applications. In this paper, we demonstrate intracellular potential monitoring of cardiomyocytes using simple 2D planar electrode array in a standard CMOS process without patch clamps or post fabricated 3D nanoelectrodes. This is enabled by our unique cardiomyocytes/fibroblasts co-culturing technique and electroporation. The co-cultured fibroblasts promote tight sealing of cardiomyocytes on electrodes and enable high-fidelity intracellular potential monitoring based on 2D planar electrode. Compared to existing technologies, our platform has a unique potential to achieve an unprecedented combination of throughput, spatiotemporal resolution, and a tissue-level field-of-view for cellular electrophysiology monitoring.