On-Chip Anticancer Drug Screening – Recent Progress in Microfluidic Platforms to Address Challenges in Chemotherapy

Publication date: Available online 12 March 2019Source: Biosensors and BioelectronicsAuthor(s): Nandini Dhiman, Peter Kingshott, Huseyin Sumer, Chandra S. Sharma, Subha Narayan RathAbstractThere is an increasing need for advanced and inexpensive preclinical models to accelerate the development of anticancer drugs. While costly animal models fail to predict human clinical outcomes, in vitro models such as microfluidic chips (‘tumor-on-chip’) are showing tremendous promise at predicting and providing meaningful preclinical drug screening outcomes. Research on ‘tumor-on-chips’ has grown enormously worldwide and is being widely accepted by pharmaceutical companies as a drug development tool. In light of this shift in philosophy, it is important to review the recent literature on microfluidic devices to determine how rapidly the technology has progressed as a promising model for drug screening and aiding cancer therapy. We review the past five years of successful developments and capabilities in microdevice technology (cancer models) for use in anticancer drug screening. Microfluidic devices are being designed to address current challenges in chemotherapy, such as drug resistance, combinatorial drug therapy, personalized medicine, and cancer metastasis are also reviewed in detail. We provide a perspective on how personalized ‘tumor-on-chip’, as well as high-throughput microfluidic platforms based on patient-specific tumor cells, can potentially replace the more expensi...
Source: Biosensors and Bioelectronics - Category: Biotechnology Source Type: research