Automated microfluidic cell culture of stem cell derived dopaminergic neurons in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson disease is a slowly progressive neurodegenerative disease characterised by dysfunction and death of selectively vulnerable midbrain dopaminergic neurons leading mainly to motor dysfunction, but also other nonmotor symptoms. The development of human in vitro cellular models with similar phenotypic characteristics to selectively vulnerable neurons is a major challenge in Parkinson disease research. We constructed a fully automated cell culture platform optimised for long-term maintenance and monitoring of induced pluripotent stem cell derived neurons in three dimensional microfluidic cell culture devices. The system can be flexibly adapted to various experimental protocols and features time-lapse imaging microscopy for quality control and electrophysiology monitoring to assess neuronal activity. Using this system, we continuously monitored the differentiation of Parkinson disease patient derived human neuroepithelial stem cells into midbrain specific dopaminergic neurons. Calcium imaging confirmed the electrophysiological activity of differentiated neurons and immunostaining confirmed the efficiency of the differentiation protocol. This system is the first example of a fully automated Organ-on-a-Chip culture and enables a versatile array of in vitro experiments for patient-specific disease modelling.