Microfluidics could improve early-stage drug development

Developing a new drug can take dozens of years and billions of dollars. In the initial stages of development, thousands of potential compounds are tested with high-throughput screening (HTS) systems to identify and optimize potential drugs. These methods are expensive, however, and unable to properly replicate physiological conditions.

While long thought incompatible with HTS, advances in microfluidics are enabling faster and more cost-efficient methods for drug screening. De Stefano et al. present a review of microfluidics in HTS, detailing its applications, advantages and limitations.

“Thanks to the different microfluidic strategies, such as droplet microfluidics or organ-on-a-chip devices, drug screening will become more patient-specific as drug concentrations, combinations, and administration profiles will be tailored on the basis of the subject response,” said author Paola De Stefano.

In this way, microfluidics in HTS can provide quicker insight into drug efficacy. It will also allow researchers to study disease progression and adapt therapies at different disease stages, which can reduce health costs and side-effects.

The review offers a critical analysis of microfluidics in HTS, underlining strategies for cell seeding, compartmentalization, continuous flow, stimuli administration and single-cell analyses. While there are still limitations, such as scaling up organ-on-a-chip devices, the authors show the potential for microfluidics in HTS to advance drug screening and personalized medicine.

“I hope to offer an overview of the potential that microfluidics holds, and inspire people who work in the field to find new points of view and ideas to solve new problems still unsolved,” De Stefano said.

Source: “The impact of microfluidics in high-throughput drug-screening applications,” by Paola De Stefano, Elena Bianchi and Gabriele Dubini, Biomicrofluidics (2022). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0087294 .