Towards the Standardization of Intestinal In Vitro Advanced Barrier Model for Nanoparticles Uptake and Crossing: The SiO₂ Case Study

Increasing interest is being addressed to the development of a reliable, reproducible and relevant in vitro model of intestinal barrier, mainly for engineered nanomaterials hazard and risk assessment, in order to meet regulatory and scientific demands. Starting from the consolidated Caco-2 cell model, widely used for determining translocation of drugs and chemicals, the establishment of an advanced intestinal barrier model with different level of complexity is important for overcoming Caco-2 monoculture limitations. For this purpose, a tri-culture model, consisting of two human intestinal epithelial cells (Caco-2 and HT29-MTX) and a human lymphocyte B cell (Raji B), was developed by several research groups to mimic the in vivo intestinal epithelium, furnishing appropriate tools for nanotoxicological studies. However, tri-culture model shows high levels of variability in ENM uptake/translocation studies. With the aim of implementing the standardization and optimization of this tri-culture for ENM translocation studies, the present paper intends to identify and discuss such relevant parameters involved in model establishment as: tri-culture condition set-up, barrier integrity evaluation, mucus characterization, M-cell induction. SiO2 fluorescent nanoparticles were used to compare the different models. Although a low level of SiO2 translocation is reported for all the different culture conditions. a relevant role of mucus and M-cells in NPs uptake/translocation has been highlighted.