A new disposable electrode for electrochemical study of leukemia K562 cells and anticancer drug sensitivity test

Developing cost-effective and simple analysis tools is of vital importance for practical applications in bioanalysis. In this work, a new disposable electrochemical cell sensor with low cost and simple fabrication was proposed to study the electrochemical behavior of leukemia K562 cells and the effect of anticancer drugs on cell viability. The analytical device was integrated by using ITO glass as the substrate of working electrodes and paper as the electrolytic cell. The cyclic voltammetry of the K562 cells at the disposable electrode exhibited an irreversible anodic peak and the peak current is proportional to the cell number. This anodic peak is attributed to the oxidation of guanine in cells involving two protons per transfer of two electrons. For the drug sensitivity tests, arsenic trioxide and cyclophosphamide were added to cell culture media. As a result, the electrochemical responses of the K562 cells decreased significantly. The cytotoxicity curves and results obtained corresponded well with the results of CCK-8 assays. In comparison to conventional methods, the proposed method is simple, rapid and inexpensive. More importantly, the developed sensor is supposed to be a single-use disposable device and electrodes were prepared "as new" for each experiment. We think that such disposable electrodes with these characteristics are suitable for experimental study with cancer cells or other types of pathogens for disease diagnosis, drug selection and on-site monitoring.