The article “Metabolic Assessment of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells-Derived Astrocytes and Fetal Primary Astrocytes: Lactate and Glucose Turnover” was published in Biosensors today.
Astrocytes play an important role in brain metabolism. In this paper, we characterize the glucose uptake and lactate secretion of these cells, comparing primary astrocytes with stem cell-derived astrocytes. We find that the latter show similar metabolic ratios as the primary cells, even if overall rates are lower. Our study pioneered the use of an easy-to-use, off-the-shelf flow-through biosensor for these metabolic assessments, demonstrating the feasibility of future integration into microfluidic devices for continuous monitoring.