Drug Discovery Evolution Using the Customized Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) are electronic platforms for automation, parallelization and cost-reduction of the chemical and biological reactions in drug discovery, medical diagnostics, DNA sequencing, protein crystallization, and other laboratory procedures. In many of drug discovery applications, large number of bio-operations must be done; thus, parallelizing the operations will be critical in reducing the experimental time of these bioassays. For these applications, current DMFB architectures should be customized in order to speed up the drug discovery processes and reduce the cost and error of these reactions. In this paper, a new microfluidic biochip architecture, which is referred to as Programmable Bio-Cell Matrix (PBCM), is used for performing bioassays. This architecture can speed up the process by parallelizing the bioassay operations, decreasing the human cost, and reducing the time of performing bioassays. PBCM is evaluated by selecting three case study bioassays including the Bicinchoninic Acid (BCA) protein assay and the assays for synthesis of aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) and acetaminophen (pa-racetamol). We compared PBCM and FPPC architectures; with our method, the number of electrodes is increased by 0.27. However, our simulations concluded that PBCM reduces the total execution time by 1.41%, the number of controlling pins by 6.68%, CAD algorithm execution time (scheduling and routing by 27.32% and 60.28%), and the area usage and corresponding costs, which proves PBCM is a faster and cheaper architecture than FPPC.