Time-resolved pharmacological studies using automated, on-line monitoring of five parallel suspension cultures

© 2017 The Author(s). Early stage pharmacological studies rely on in vitro methodologies for screening and testing compounds. Conventional assays based on endpoint measurements provide limited information because the lack in temporal resolution may not determine the pharmacological effect at its maximum. We developed an on-line, automated system for near real-time monitoring of extracellular content from five parallel suspension cultures, combining cell density measurements with a high-resolution separations every 12 minutes for 4 days. Selector and switching valves provide the fluidic control required to sample from one culture during the analysis of the previous sample from another culture, a time-saving measure that is fundamental to the throughput of the presented system. The system was applied to study the metabolic effects of the drugs rotenone, β-lapachone and clioquinol using lactate as metabolic indicator. For each drug, 96 assays were executed on the extracellular matrix at three concentrations with two controls in parallel, consuming only 5.78 mL of media from each culture over four days, less than 60 μL per analysis. The automated system provides high sample throughput, good temporal resolution and low sample consumption combined with a rugged analytical method with adequate sensitivity, providing a promising new platform for pharmacological and biotechnological studies.