To address the needs of the life sciences community and the pharmaceutical industry in pre-clinical drug development to both maintain and continuously assess tissue metabolism and function with simple and rapid systems, we improved on the initial BaroFuse to develop it into a fully functional, pumpless, scalable multi-channel fluidics instrument that continuously measures changes in oxygen consumption and other endpoints in response to test compounds. We and several other laboratories assessed it with a wide range of tissue types including retina, pancreatic islets, liver, and hypothalamus with both aqueous and gaseous test compounds. The setup time was less than an hour for all collaborating groups, and there was close agreement between data obtained from the different laboratories. This easy-to-use system reliably generates real-time metabolic and functional data from tissue and cells in response to test compounds that will address a critical need in basic and applied research.
Competing Interests: Declaration of interests I.R.S., D.C., G.K., K.B., and M.K.G. have financial ties to EnTox Sciences, Inc. (Mercer Island, WA, USA), the manufacturer/distributor of the BaroFuse perifusion system used in this study. There is a patent pending on the BaroFuse, the rights to which would be granted to the University of Washington. T.J.W. has received equity and royalty from Ocutheia, LLC. S.A.S. has received grant funding from Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., and is a consultant for Novo Nordisk.
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