A flexible, microfluidic, dispensing system for screening drug combinations

Abstract

It is known that in many cases a combination of drugs is more effective than single-drug treatments both for reducing toxicity and increasing efficacy. With the advent of organoid screens, personalised medicine has become possible for many diseases. Automated pipetting to well plates is the pharmaceutical industry standard for drug screening, but this is relatively expensive and slow. Here, a rotary microfluidic system is presented that can test all possible drug combinations at speed with the use of droplets. For large numbers of combinations, it is shown how the experimental scale is reduced by considering drug dilutions and machine learning. As an example, two cases are considered; the first is a three-ring and three radii configuration and the second is a four ring and forty-eight radii configuration. Between these two, all other cases are shown to be possible. The proposed commercial instrument is shown to be flexible, the user choosing which wells to fill and which driver-computational sub-routine to select. The major issues addressed here are the programming theory of the instrument and the reduction of droplets to be generated by drug dilutions and machine learning.