Abstract
The use of precision medicine for chemotherapy requires the individualization of the therapeutic regimen for each patient. This approach improves treatment efficacy and reduces the probability of administering ineffective drugs. To ensure accurate decision-making in a timely manner, anticancer drug efficacy tests must be performed within a short timeframe using a small number of cancer cells. These requirements can be satisfied via microfluidics-based drug screening platforms, which are composed of complex fluidic channels and closed systems. Owing to their complexity, skilled manipulation is required. In this study, we developed a microfluidic platform, to accurately perform multiple drug efficacy tests using a small number of cells, which can be conducted via simple manipulation. As it is a small, open-chamber system, a minimal number of cells could be loaded through simple pipetting. Furthermore, the extracellular matrix gel inside the chamber provides an in vivo-like environment that enables the localized delivery of the drugs to spontaneously diffuse from the channels underneath the chamber without a pump, thereby efficiently and robustly testing the efficacy and resistance of multiple drugs. We demonstrated that this platform enabled the rapid and facile testing of multiple drugs using a small number of cells (~ 10,000) over a short period of time (~ 2 days). These results provide the possibility of using this powerful platform for selecting therapeutic medication, developing new drugs, and delivering personalized medicine to patients.
Highlights
The use of precision medicine for chemotherapy requires the individualization of the therapeutic regimen for each patient
Except for some extraordinary cases such as leukemia, the total number of cancer cells acquired from general, small, solid tissue after dissociation may be less than 1 million
As a miniaturization technology with internal dimensions ranging from micrometers to millimeters, a microfluidic platform for drug analysis constitute a miniaturized, in-vivo-like analytical environment connected to a 3-dimensional (3-D) cell model cultured on organ m icrochips[16]
Summary
The use of precision medicine for chemotherapy requires the individualization of the therapeutic regimen for each patient. To ensure accurate decision-making in a timely manner, anticancer drug efficacy tests must be performed within a short timeframe using a small number of cancer cells These requirements can be satisfied via microfluidics-based drug screening platforms, which are composed of complex fluidic channels and closed systems. As a miniaturization technology with internal dimensions ranging from micrometers to millimeters, a microfluidic platform for drug analysis constitute a miniaturized, in-vivo-like analytical environment connected to a 3-dimensional (3-D) cell model cultured on organ m icrochips[16] It could concurrently provide analytical efficiency and high-throughput screening with minimal consumption of the sample or r eagents[17]. It is necessary to develop a drug-testing platform that can quickly confirm the effectiveness of a drug using simple operating process that consumes a small amount of each sample
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