Drug Discovery Applications: A Customized Digital Microfluidic Biochip Architecture/CAD Flow

Abstract

Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) have significant potential to accelerate a wide range of drug discovery applications, including high-throughput screening, toxicity testing, and drug designing and development. On the other hand, the conventional approach for drug discovery is very time-consuming and error prone. For these applications, current DMFB architectures should be customized to speed up the drug discovery processes and reduce the cost and error of these reactions. Because many drug-related assays repetitively and concurrently use some operations, we developed a new DMFB architecture and the corresponding CAD flow for drug discovery applications. This architecture can accelerate the process by parallelizing the operations, decreasing the area and costs, and improving the execution time of bioassays.