Investigating Cardiac Activity Modulation through Multielectrode Arrays and Organic Photovoltaic Devices

The aim of this study was to demonstrate the capability of organic photovoltaic devices (OPDs) to stimulate cardiac cells and modulate their beating patterns. We utilized spontaneously beating chick embryo ventricular heart cells, which are commonly used as a model system for better understanding cardiac excitation mechanisms and arrythmia, which includes effects such as overdrive suppression or frequency entrainment.1,2 Dispersed cells from 7-day embryonic chick hearts were cultured on OPDs for two to three days, so that they aggregate to form cellular clusters and dense monolayers.3 Changes in cardiac contractions and calcium transients in response to optoelectronic stimulation were analyzed based on video recordings from a microscope camera. Multielectrode arrays (MEAs) were used to establish effective stimulation parameters and validate the image sequence analysis of cellular contractions. Our results show that cardiac rhythmicity can be successfully modulated in vitro using OPDs. The extraction of beating patterns from camera recordings is a reliable tool to investigate the correlation between electrical and mechanical activity. These results form the basis for further experiments investigating the effects of OPD stimulation on two-dimensional cell cultures.

References
1. Kunysz et al.: Overdrive suppression of spontaneously beating Chick Heart Cell Aggregates: Experiment and theory. American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology. 1995;269(3).
2. Antzelevitch and Burashnikov: Overview of basic mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmia. Cardiac Electrophysiology Clinics.;3(1):23–45.
3. Krogh-Madsen et al.: An ionic model for rhythmic activity in small clusters of embryonic chick ventricular cells. American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology 2005 289:1, H398-H413.