Development of a High-throughput Cellular Analysis Platform for Monitoring Particulate Matter Toxicity

ANNA KAEHR, Fobang Liu, Guillaume Aubry, Hang Lu, Nga Lee Ng, Georgia Institute of Technology

     Abstract Number: 245
     Working Group: Health-Related Aerosols

Abstract
Exposure to particulate matter (PM) pollution is one of the top environmental risk factors affecting public health. Adverse health effects to PM exposure have been linked to oxidative stress, inducing downstream inflammatory response and cell damage. Studies on the impact of diverse PM chemical composition on cellular toxicity have been limited because many cellular assays are low-throughput and challenging to implement in large-scale screening efforts due to their time and resource intensiveness. To better evaluate cellular responses to PM exposure, we have developed a high-throughput microfluidic platform with low sample consumption and high reproducibility in PM delivery across multiple orders of magnitude of PM mass. Additionally, we have implemented a streamlined image analysis workflow that identifies cells and quantifies their oxidative stress response with high accuracy. With this pipeline, we can conduct parallel analyses of hundreds of cells exposed to the same condition for statistical power in detecting differences in cellular response upon exposure to PM of varying dose and composition. We validated the performance of our platform against a conventional well plate-based exposure system to show the utility of our microfluidic exposure model. This new technology serves to increase the feasibility of cellular toxicity screening for predicting adverse health effects from PM exposure.