Multi-electrode arrays (MEAs) with guided network for cell-to-cell communication transduction

Extracellular signals of living cells provide much information of their cellular electrophysiology, which is extremely important for medical diagnosis and drug discovery. Extracting extracellular signal, however, is always difficult due to its small magnitude relative to the noise and apparently random direction of signal propagation. In this work, a low noise multi-electrode array (MEA) system has been developed using the IC fabrication technology to extract the extracellular signals. Cardiac myocytes (heart muscle cells) have been cultured on the chip surface, after proper packaging. The signal propagation of the cardiac myocytes has been captured to demonstrate the effectiveness of the MEA.