A Dynamic In Vitro Model for Testing Intestinal Absorption of Different Vegetable Food Secondary Metabolites

Cell-based bioreactors are important tools for evaluating molecule absorption in dynamic conditions, simulating simil-physiological flow, transport, and biological barriers. They allow for absorption and metabolization studies to be performed, obtaining very predictive data of in vivo conditions. In this paper, a new dynamic model is proposed to evaluate the intestinal absorption and toxicity of different vegetable food secondary metabolites, by using a LiveFlow® bioreactor. Different food secondary metabolites, such as caffeic, quinic, and rosmarinic acids, quercetin, and rutin, belonging to the polyphenols class, were selected. The aim was to study their different intestinal absorptions in order to validate this new system as an alternative strategy or a more advanced method compared to conventional culture systems for absorption screening and testing. The molecule absorption and the potential generation of metabolites were evaluated by RP-HPLC-DAD. This new dynamic platform represents a promising in vitro methodology which can provide more information than the traditional static in vitro approaches, and an efficient alternative to animal models, at least in preliminary experiments.