BIOBRIEFPAPER
Reactive oxygen species are short lived markers of cellular stress. A Draper team now monitors them continuously across 96 tissue on chip models, the first such demonstration in microphysiological systems.
Reactive oxygen species are short-lived chemical signals tied to metabolism, injury, and disease response. In a tissue-on-chip experiment, they can vanish in seconds, so researchers have had to sample and miss the peak. A team at Draper has wired a 96-channel sensor array into PREDICT96, the lab's high-throughput microphysiological system, and used it to watch fleeting cellular stress as a continuous readout (Lab on a Chip, PMID 42823931).
The amperometric array targets hydrogen peroxide, a prototypical reactive oxygen species, at concentrations between 1 and 10 micromolar, with selectivity high enough to pick the signal out of a working tissue model. Integrated microfluidic pumping stirs the sample during measurement, so the sensor can catch low-concentration or rapidly decaying signals that static reads would miss. The authors describe the work as a first demonstration of a highly multiplexed electrochemical sensor capability in microphysiological systems.
PREDICT96 is a Draper-built platform designed to run many living tissue models in parallel, including lung-immune tissue for viral respiratory infection studies (platform overview; MPS World Summit 2026 showcase; respiratory infection research). The new sensor slots in as a module rather than a new platform, and the paper scopes the work to disease modeling and medical countermeasure evaluation. Wider validation, comparator benchmarks against earlier MPS ROS sensors, and any commercialization path are not addressed in the published abstract.