Development of a polysulfone hollow fiber vascular bio-artificial pancreas device for in vitro studies.

ABSTRACT

A system for vascular hollow fiber bio-artificial pancreas development, optimization and in vitro testing was implemented and operated in a simple and fully described manner, allowing other researchers to test a variety of experimental conditions (different biomaterials, biologic tissue, addition of proteins or other adjuvants). In this work, a polysulfone hollow fiber was used as bioprotective material. Two different cell sources were co-immobilized with agarose microspheres in and experimented with the membrane device rat islets of Langerhans and mouse beta-TC-3 insulinoma cells. The results obtained with islets of Langerhans were used as islet comparable insulin-release data. Beta-TC-3 cells were mainly used in these studies, due to higher control and reproducibility of cell number and behavior addition of hemoglobin was beneficial for sustained cell viability, especially during cell insertion in the device (viability assessed by beta-TC-3 lactate dehydrogenase activity in the recirculating culture medium); cells did not adhere to the polysulfone membrane (assessed by SEM observation of membrane samples from dynamic cultures). Comparable device functionality and insulin-release results were attained with both cell types device functionality was maintained for 7-9 days and maximum insulin-release during dynamic glucose challenges were 2.6 x 10(-3)+/-7 x 10(-5)microU/beta-cell x 8 h, with islets, and 9.3 x 10(-4)+/-2 x 10(-5)microU/beta-cell x 2 h, with beta-TC-3 cells.