Serial dilution microchip for cytotoxicity test

Abstract

Today's pharmaceutical industry is facing challenges resulting from the vast increases in sample numbers produced by high-throughput screening (HTS). In addition, the bottlenecks created by increased demand for cytotoxicity testing (required to assess compound safety) are becoming a serious problem. We have developed a polymer PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) based microfluidic device that can perform a cytotoxicity test in a rapid and reproducible manner. The concept that the device includes is well adjustable to automated robots in huge HTS systems, so we can think of it as a potential dilution and delivery module. Cytotoxicity testing is all about the dilution and dispensing of a drug sample. Previously, we made a PDMS based microfluidic device which automatically and precisely diluted drugs with a buffer solution with serially increasing concentrations. This time, the serially diluted drug solution was directly delivered to 96 well plates for cytotoxicity testing. Cytotoxic paclitaxel solution with 2% RPMI 1640 has been used while carrying out cancerous cell based cytotoxicity tests. We believe that this rapid and robust use of the PDMS microchip will overcome the growing problem in cytotoxicity testing for HTS.