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12-03 :: March/April 2012
nanotimes Research
Drug Discovery // A Cheaper, Faster and More Efficient Platform for Preclinical Drug Discovery Applications
© Based on Material by IBN
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invented by scientists at the Institute of Bioengi- neering and Nanotechnology (IBN) in Singapore. Called ‘Fish and Chips’, the novel multi-channel mi- crofluidic perfusion platform can grow and monitor the development of various tissues and organs inside zebrafish embryos for drug toxicity testing.
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The IBN ‘Fish and Chips’ has been designed for dynamic long-term culturing and live imaging of the zebrafish embryos. The microfluidic platform compri- ses three parts: 1) a row of eight fish tanks, in which the embryos are placed and covered with an oxygen permeable membrane, 2) a fluidic concentration gra- dient generator to dispense the growth medium and drugs, and 3) eight output channels for the removal of the waste products. The novelty of the ‘Fish and Chips’ lies in its unique diagonal flow architecture, which allows the embryos to be continually sub- merged in a uniform and consistent flow of growth medium and drugs (see image), and the attached gradient generator, which can dispense different con- centrations of drugs to eight different embryos at the same time for dose-dependent drug studies.
cheaper, faster and more efficient platform for preclinical drug discovery applications has been
Side view of the ‘Fish and Chips’, which illustrates how the flow travels diagonally across the fish tank, and envelops the embryo in the drug solution. © IBN
Deepak Choudhury, Danny van Noort, Ciprian Iliescu, Baixue Zheng, Kar-Lai Poon, Svetlana Korzh, Vladimir Korzh and Hanry Yu: Fish and Chips: A Microfluidic Per- fusion Platform for Monitoring Zebrafish Development, In: Lab on a Chip, Vol. 12 (2012), Issue 5, Pages 892-900, DOI: 10.1039/C1LC20351G: http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C1LC20351G