Towards Label-Free Platform for Monitoring Interaction Between Cells and Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide Nanoparticles

Recent advances of Superparamagnetic Iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) for clinical and research applications had triggered the need to understand their effects in cells. Despite of the great advances in adapting various biological and chemical methods to assess in-vitro toxicity of SPIONs, less attention has been paid on the development of high throughput label-free screening platform to study the interaction between the cells and nanoparticles. In this paper, we have taken a first step toward this goal by proposing a label free impedimetric method for monitoring living cells treated with SPIONs. We demonstrate the effect of SPIONs on the adhesion, growth, proliferation and viability of neuroblastoma cells using impedance spectroscopy in comparison to other standard microscopic and cell viability testing methods. We also report how to increase throughput using multiwell cultures. Our results suggest that 10 MΩ impedance change of electrodes exposed to the mixture of cells and SPIONs offer a wide dynamic range suitable for monitoring the effect of SPIONs with a concentration less than 100 μg/mL.