New micro-device could change drug testing
(麻豆淫院Org.com) -- Texas Tech University scientists have filed for a patent on a new device that could make some drug testing faster and less expensive.
Siva Vanapalli, an assistant professor in Texas Tech鈥檚 Department of Chemical Engineering, and his team created a simple microfluidic device about the size of a penny that could replace the current drug screening systems. Vanapalli鈥檚 work was recently featured in the journal Lab on a Chip.
鈥淭o develop a drug one must develop not only the drug compound, but also determine how much of the drug to give for it to be effective,鈥� said Vanapalli.
Vanapalli is currently working with anti-bacterial chemicals, but hopes the process can be refined to aid in screening for new anti-cancer drugs.
The pharmaceutical industry screens hundreds of thousands of drug candidates each year using large robots that deliver one specific concentration of the drug at a time, a time-consuming process that requires large amounts of the compound and reagents.
鈥淥ur chip changes the process in two ways,鈥� said Vanapalli. 鈥淲e can do multiple concentrations of the drug at one time. That means we can use a sample maybe 1,000 times smaller than the amount currently used and we can do the same work in a much shorter time period. In short, making the drug screening process faster and more inexpensive for the pharmaceutical company and hopefully reducing the ultimate cost to the consumer.鈥�
Vanapalli鈥檚 lab has demonstrated testing 60 different concentrations of a drug in about 10 minutes and expects to be able to improve on those numbers in future devices.
The new device looks like a computer chip with multiple microchannels and nanoliter-wells to hold an array of droplets of a substance. A scientist can vary the presence of other materials from drop-to-drop, thus testing multiple concentrations of the drug at the same time.
The use the microfluidic droplet arrays for drug testing was actually an accident. 鈥淲e were working on a different type of experiment, but the outcome led us down this path,鈥� said Vanapalli. 鈥淚t is incidents like this that make science exciting.鈥�
Vanapalli鈥檚 research is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.
Provided by Texas Tech University
