Lab-on-a-chip Drug Monitoring
Researchers from the University of California, Irvine have developed a “lab on a chip” Drug monitoring platform to facilitate continuous, inexpensive, rapid, and personalized drug screening.
Lab-on-a-chip Drug Monitoring technology is capable of evaluating the effectiveness of treatments on cancer cells without bulky readout equipment or requiring the shipment of samples to labs.
The study has been published in the America Chemical Society journal Analytical Chemistry.
Rahim Esfandyarpour, UCI assistant professor of electrical engineering & computer science, said that there is an increase in the need for simplified and low-cost identification of a patient’s cancer resistance and medication efficacy before and throughout treatment.
He added that the new “lab on chips” another step toward potentially enabling the personalized screening of drug efficacy on individual patients’ samples. This will result in better optimization of the patient’s treatment.
He said that most current approaches to drug efficacy testing require expensive imaging, lab work, and large-scale cell culture experiments.
Vanessa Velasco, a Stanford University postdoctoral researcher and the co-author of the paper, said that Lab-on-a-chip Drug Monitoring is an initial prototype that the team hopes to further develop in the future into personalized medicine tools for cancer patients facing drug resistance
.The lab-on-a-chip technology employs advanced electrical & electrochemical techniques to precisely manipulate cancer cells of interest. This is done in parallel with the continuous characterization of the potential effectiveness of therapeutic agents custom-made for patients.
The result of using the Lab-on-a-chip Drug Monitoring technology should significantly reduce the time and cost associated with treating cancer.
Editor’s Note: Lab-on-a-chip Drug Monitoring, Personalized Drug Screening Method, Personalized medicine for cancer, Personalized Drug Efficacy Monitoring Chip
