Fabrication and Testing of Hypoxia Flask for In Vitro use

Hypoxia studies are done in several ways. However, we cannot directly experiment on humans, so we start with experiments on cells and then on small animals. Currently, there is no device to give direct hypoxia treatment to cells, i.e., for in vitro studies. Some hypoxia chambers are available but have the following challenges: Lack of reproducibility, very bulky and large size, and too expensive Problems due to tricky experimental conditions, where sterile air with low oxygen concentrations is required to be maintained for a prolonged time in a hypoxia experiment. Most of the time, the experiments don’t show consistent results and lead to the loss of expensive chemicals.

We have designed a compact, handy, and significantly cheap- Hypoxia Flask, which will be very helpful for scientists performing hypoxia experiments in vitro. The proposed prototype will help plan hypoxia experiments conveniently. A design patent has already been granted for the same, and a utility patent has already been filed by Dr. Satyam Kumar Agrawal. Additionally, only a fabricated device will not be sufficient. We also need to test or validate the same to prove that it gives the desired results, as hypothesized. With this prototype, we propose to achieve a device that can be used to perform in vitro hypoxia experiments.