A novel system to study dermal-hepatic interactions in vitro

An apparatus containing both skin diffusion and cell culture chambers has been developed in our laboratory. A piece of skin is placed in a flow-through diffusion chamber with the epidermis exposed to a test compound. The compound penetrates through the skin and partitions from the dermis into a flowing buffer. The moving stream then proceeds to a cell chamber containing HEP-G2 (liver) cells. Effluent from the cell chamber is collected and assayed for glucose oxidation. This system enables the direct examination of dermal-hepatic relationships without the complexities of an in vivo system. It can also be used with other diffusional barriers or cell types