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Microfluidic Chip Speeds Up Testing of Specialized Cancer Drugs

Until recently, a cancer drug lab screening could test ten variables in one day. A new microfluidic chip developed by University of Michigan engineers can now test one thousand different variable in one hour. This allows doctors to more quickly identify the best treatment for the individual patient based on their type of cancer and biology. When fighting cancer, speed is of the utmost importance. These chips are especially useful for testing photodynamic cancer treatments in which drugs are only activated when exposed to light. This kind of hyper localized cancer treatment reduces the negative side effects of other options, like chemotherapy.

Topics:
Drug Delivery Fluid Handling Medical Motion Control Optics Photonics Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 in a development of a drug speed is important time is always very important the traditional way is that a doctor will try out first with one drug it will take a few months at least to wait how well that drug works then they'll try drug number two and it may take another few months and that is a very long process and and the life expectancy of that patient is not long

    00:00:34 enough what we really needed was from Dr yun's lab where we can now do many many experiments in a much shorter time in my lab we do a lot of micro developed especially for cancer drug screening in conventional experimental setups uh it takes a day only just doing 10 different conditions uh for testing but in our microfic chip we can do an experimental with uh thousand different conditions in

    00:01:07 an hour Focus you want a drug only to kill the cancer cells but it is going to kill a lot of other cells which means there are going to be bad side effects so one of the idea is to localize or Target the therapy as much as possible the beautiful advantage of photodynamic treatment is even if your photo drug goes to the Dark Places it's not going

    00:01:39 to do anything unless activated by the light on the other hand with the photo dnamic treatment you also have to make sure that the tissue has enough oxygen in addition to the drug concentration and the light concentration and that's why you need a s phisticated instrument to be able to study simultaneously all those parameters and that's why the special microfluidic chip

    00:02:11 of Dr Yun comes in very handily using this advanced microfabrication technology we can actually uh stack in three layers one layer is a cell layer which we can introduce and inject cancer cells and culture them and injecting drugs in different uh concentrations and also we can put it onto the air channel uh in which we can making a lot of different

    00:02:37 oxygen concentration differences and also we got stacking of optical filter underneath stacking them all together we can provide uh in a thousand different conditions from the one single chip which is around 5 mm x 5 mm in core size and we can use a 10 chips then maybe that's the 10,000 different conditions this makes a huge difference how fast we can

    00:03:04 develop a new drug or a new Nano drug I had a sister who died of cancer my mother died of cancer this is a part of the motivation to help out and do better than we were able to do hopefully won't be too late for future patients I think you need to come up with some fresh ideas it would be really nice if you could grab those cancer cells and

    00:03:36 analyze them rather than looking at the primary tumor itself this is minimally invasive test