Abstract
The up-and-coming microfluidic technology is the most promising platform for designing anti-cancer drugs and new point-of-care diagnostics. Compared to conventional drug screening methods based on Petri dishes and animal studies, drug delivery in microfluidic systems has many advantages. For instance, these platforms offer high-throughput drug screening, require a small number of samples, provide an in vivo-like microenvironment for cells, and eliminate ethical issues associated with animal studies. Multiple cell cultures in microfluidic chips could better mimic the 3D tumor environment using low reagents consumption. The clinical experiments have shown that combinatorial drug treatments have a better therapeutic effect than monodrug therapy. Many attempts have been made in this field in the last decade. This review highlights the applications of microfluidic chips in anti-cancer drug screening and systematically categorizes these systems as a function of sample size and combination of drug screening. Finally, it provides a perspective on the future of the clinical applications of microfluidic systems for anti-cancer drug development.
Highlights
Microfluidic technology has various potential applications in cancer research, including drug screening, drug discovery, immunotherapy, and clinical oncology [1,2]
We focus on the recent advances in cancer drug screening using microfluidic technology
The review was wasto toprovide provideaaguideline guidelinetotoselect selectthe theappropriate appropriThe main main objective objective of this review ate microfluidic drug screening chips based on the available sample
Summary
Microfluidic technology has various potential applications in cancer research, including drug screening, drug discovery, immunotherapy, and clinical oncology [1,2]. Valente et al reviewed anti-cancer drug development with the application of microfluidic technology with a focus on the modeling of the tumor microenvironment, high-throughput assays, and microfluidic-integrated biosensors [25]. Since different modes of drug testing (mono or combinatorial) could be desired, this study classifies the presented microfluidics into three categories based on sample size and combinatorial or monodrugs for drug screening applications. These categories include monodrug screening on a microscale sample, monodrug screening on a macroscale sample, and combinatorial drug screening on a microscale sample. The pros and cons of each of these classes will be thoroughly discussed in more detail
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