Construction And Application Of A Kidney Microfluidic Chip

The kidney is an important organ in human body,and plays a vital role in maintaining the dynamic balance of the internal environment of human body.The renal function impairments are often observed in clinical practice,which are usually related to the use of drugs.Chinese herbal medicine is a splendid legacy of the Chinese nation.With the deepening of research on Chinese herbal medicine,the safety of Chinese herbal medicine related preparations has attracted widespread attention and also restricted the application of Chinese herbal medicine.A large number of clinical cases show that kidney damage is caused by traditional Chinese medicine.In this experiment,a model of renal microfluidic chip was designed based on the microfluidic chip platform.The chip was mainly composed of two layers of PC board,four layers(concentration gradient generation layer,positioning layer,simulated urine layer,adjustment layer)which were made of PDMS(polydimethyl siloxane)and a layer(simulated blood layer)which was made of PMMA(polymethyl methacrylate).The chip was fixed by 4screws and 8 nuts.A 10 ?m porous polycarbonate membrane separated the simulated blood and urine layers in the chip,and provided a cell growth plane.The disposable infusion sets with smoothed needles were used as the inlet and outlet lines,and the injection pump was used as the culture fluid flow culture power equipment.The chip type can be changed by changing the position of the inlet and outlet and the type of seeded cells.There were 8 parallel channels in the chip,which can simultaneously detect the effect of 8 different concentrations of compound concentration on cells.Primary rat podocytes,renal tubular epithelial cells and microvascular endothelial cells were extracted,and the three cells were inoculated according to a certain ratio and physiological structure.On the chip,the simulated blood and simulated urine(medium)were passed to build the kidney microenvironment.According to different cell inoculation and liquid infusion methods,the chip can be used as a nephron chip,a renal tubule chip,and a glomerular chip,respectively.The experimental results showed that the kidney chip designed in this experiment can run stably within 48 h and maintain the growth state of rat primary kidney cells.The chip was used to investigate the degree of damage to the primary kidney cells from the active ingredients of the traditional Chinese medicine Phytolacca acinosa Roxb.AM/PI staining showed that different concentrations of the traditional Chinese medicine ingredients in thechip did not damage the kidney cells to a degree.This experiment is expected to be a Chinese medicine in the field of microfluidic chips.The nephrotoxicity evaluation platform provides ideas for further development.