Fabrication of Miniature Drug Screening Platform Using Low Cost Bioprinting Technology

摘要

In the pharmaceutical industry, new chemicals and substances are being tested to find appropriate compounds or mix for treating a specific disease. The demand for screening large compound collections against and increasing number of therapeutic targets has stimulated technology development in the areas of assay automation and miniaturization. Unfortunately, some of these new compounds are rather hard to obtain, which causes an expensive research and limited material availability; therefore, increasing the time development for future cures.rnWe have developed a new and low-cost deposition method to fabricate miniature drug screening platform that can realistically and inexpensively evaluate biochemical reactions up to 4 substances per trial in a picoliter-scale volume. This paper describes the development of the controls for a deposition method (inkjet printing technology) which will simultaneously place therapeutic drugs and cells onto target sites to fabricate cell/drug chips for drug screening application. Using a modified HP 5360 CD printer, droplets of GFP expressing Escherichia coli have been deposited in an agar coated coverslip chip as small reliable volume of 180 picoliters per each colony dot, along with this bacteria it has been patterned different antibiotics in such a way that we evaluated the growth of the bacteria under antibiotics presence. The viability and function of the printed cells were evaluated by the live/dead and plasmid gene transfection experiments resulting in more than 98% viability and maintaining DNA function. Moreover, it has been recorded as high throughput process printing 213 assays per second. Due to the reduction of volume, this method will increase the effectiveness of the resources utilized for emerging drug screening processes. The results show promising usage of resources for future drug screening through new biochemicals.