Beijing Engineering Research Center for BioNanotechnology and CAS Key Laboratory for Biomedical Effects of Nanomaterials and Nanosafety, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience , National Center for NanoScience and Technology , No. 11 Zhongguancun Beiyitiao , Beijing 100190 , P. R. China.
Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies , Peking University , Beijing 100871 , P. R. China.
ACS Sens. 2019 Jun 28;4(6):1465-1475. doi: 10.1021/acssensors.9b00479. Epub 2019 May 17.
Microfluidics is an appealing platform for drug screening and discovery. Compared with the conventional drug screening methods based on Petri dishes and experimental animals, microfluidic devices have many advantages including miniaturized size, ease-to-use, high sensitivity, and high throughput. More importantly, bioassays on microfluidics can avoid ethical issues which can be a big obstacle hindering the performance of the experiments on animals or human being. Furthermore, three-dimensional (3D) microchips can recapitulate various biochemical and biophysical conditions in vivo and mimic the natural microenvironment of the tissues/organs, providing versatile in vitro models for biomedical applications. In this Perspective, we will focus on the cell-based microfluidic assays for drug screening. Meanwhile, we also propose potential solutions for the difficulties in this field and discuss the prospects of microfluidics-based technologies for drug screening.
微流控技术是药物筛选和发现的一种有吸引力的平台。与基于培养皿和实验动物的传统药物筛选方法相比，微流控设备具有许多优点，包括小型化、易于使用、高灵敏度和高通量。更重要的是，微流控上的生物测定可以避免伦理问题，这是阻碍动物或人类实验性能的一个主要障碍。此外，三维（3D）微芯片可以重现体内各种生化和生物物理条件，并模拟组织/器官的自然微环境，为生物医学应用提供多功能的体外模型。在本观点中，我们将重点介绍基于细胞的微流控药物筛选分析。同时，我们还为该领域的困难提出了潜在的解决方案，并讨论了基于微流控技术的药物筛选的前景。
