Dataset supporting "From mouth to gut: microfluidic in vitro simulation of human gastro-intestinal digestion and intestinal permeability"

Manuscript abstract: Reproducible <em>in vitro</em> studies of bioaccessibility, intestinal absorption and bioavailability are key to the successful development of novel foods and drugs aiming for oral administration. There is currently a lack of methods that offer the finesse required to study these parameters for valuable molecules in small volumes - as is the case of nanomaterials under research. Here, we describe a modular microfluidic-based platform for total simulation of the human gastro-intestinal tract. Digestion-chips and cell-based gut-chips were fabricated from PDMS by soft lithography. On-chip digestion was validated using a fluorescently-labelled casein derivative, which followed typical Michaelis-Menten kinetics and showed temporal resolution and good agreement with well-established bench-top protocols. Irreversible inhibition of serine proteases using Pefabloc® SC and a 1:6 dilution was sufficient to mitigate the cytotoxicity of simulated digestion fluids. Caco-2/HT29-MTX co-cultures were grown on-chip under continuous flow for 7 days to obtain a differentiated cell monolayer forming a 3D villi-like epithelium with clear tight junction formation, and with an apparent permeability (P_app) of Lucifer Yellow closely approximating values reported <em>ex vivo</em> (3.7x10^-6 ± 1.4x10^-6 vs 4.0x10^-6 ± 2.2x10^-6). Digesta from the Digestion-chips were flowed through the Gut-Chip demonstrating the capacity to study sample digestion and intestinal permeability in a single microfluidic platform holding great promise for its use in pharmacokinetics studies.