Improvement of electrical stimulation protocol for simultaneous measurement of extracellular potential with on-chip multi-electrode array system

Cardiotoxicity testing with a multi-electrode array (MEA) system requires the stable beating of cardiomyocytes for the measurement of the field potential duration (FPD), because different spontaneous beating rates cause different responses of FPD prolongation induced by drugs, and the beating rate change effected by drugs complicates the FPD prolongation assessment. We have developed an on-chip MEA system with electrical stimulation for the measurement of the FPD during the stable beating of human embryonic stem (ES) cell-derived cardiomyocyte clusters. Using a conventional bipolar stimulation protocol, we observed such large artifacts in electrical stimulation that we could not estimate the FPD quantitatively. Therefore, we improved the stimulation protocol by using sequential rectangular pulses in which the positive and negative stimulation voltages and number of pulses could be changed flexibly. The balanced voltages and number of pulses for sequential rectangular pulses enabled the recording of small negative artifacts only, which hardly affected the FPD measurement of human-ES-cell-derived cardiomyocyte clusters. These conditions of electrical stimulation are expected to find applications for the control of constant beating for cardiotoxicity testing.