Functionalization of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PETE) Membranes for the Enhancement of Cellular Adhesion in Organ-on-a-Chip Devices

Experimental reproducibility in organ-on-chip (OOC) devices is a challenging issue, mainly caused by cell adhesion problems, as OOC devices are made of bioinert materials not suitable for natural cellularization of their surfaces. To improve cell adhesion, several surface functionalization techniques have been proposed, among which the simple use of an intermediate layer of adsorbed proteins has become the preferred one by OOC users. This way, the cells use surface receptors to adhere to the adsorbed proteins, which are in turn attached to the surface. However, as protein adsorption is based on weak electrostatic bonding between the coating proteins and the substrate, this method produces suboptimal results: as the weak electrostatic bonds break, cells detach, leading to poor, heterogeneous cellularization. To solve this problem, we present a surface functionalization method for polyethylene terephthalate (PETE) membranes, commonly used in multilayer organ-on-chip devices to support cellular layers. This protocol involves hydrolyzation of the membrane, followed by (3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide (EDC) and N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS) activation, resulting in covalent bonding between the membrane and coating proteins, much stronger than the weak electrostatic bonding provided by simple adsorption. As evaluation, we first measured the effect of the functionalization protocol in the morphological and mechanical integrity of the membranes. Next, we confirmed protein coating efficiency using the ζ potential and surface tension of the functionalized membranes coated with collagen type I, polylysine, gelatin, albumin, fetal bovine serum (FBS), and Matrigel. Finally, we showed that our method significantly improves the attachment of epithelial (A549) and endothelial (EA.hy926) cell lines under static conditions, especially in collagen-coated membranes, which were further tested under dynamic conditions, showing statistically significant improvement in cell attachment compared to uncoated or collagen-adsorbed only membranes.