Drug Screening System by Microcantilever Biochip

摘要

Taiwan, located in the subtropical region, is one of the major epidemic areas of Japanese encephalitis, dengue fever and enterovirus. There is still no effective drug or vaccine that can truly cure the mentioned-above infectious diseases until now. It is the first priority to understand the infection processes of the viruses in order to find effective antiviral drugs or vaccines. Most traditional methods have to use large equipments located in the laboratory to detect or analyse virus. Although they have accurate detection abilities, but also have many disadvantages like long detection time, large volume of samples and reagents, non-real time, expensive cost. This study has proposed a novel system to record completed infection processes of Japanese encephalitis, dengue fever and enterovirus. Meanwhile, the inhibiting ability of antibody or antiviral drug has studied also by the same system. The system is consisted of a biochip manufactured by MEMS technology, optical measurement platform, and biocompatible hydrogel material. The biochip size is 3.15 x 3.15 cm which is consisted of microcantilever beams with hydrogel and a PDMS microfluidic. The biochip successfully recorded infection processes of different viruses in different concentrations. It was found that Japanese encephalitis had obvious penetration, replication and separation stages. Furthermore, dengue fever virus, which is the same genus as Japanese encephalitis, had a similar infection process. In view of the detection results, for each of the virus mentioned above, the effective specific antibody and the ineffective non-specific antibody were respectively injected into the biochips along with the virus. The antivirus ability of the antibodies was verified within few hours. The tedious work and the time cost by traditional immunoassay were avoided. In addition, the antiviral drug, algae extract, was proved that it could inhibit dengue fever virus for few hours. This study had proved that the biochip and detection system could successfully record completed infection processes for different virus and drug screen. It is believed that the experiment results described above are helpful for drug screen, functional food, and vaccine discovery.