Integrative nanobioengineering: Novel bioelectronic tools for real time pharmaceutical high content screening in living cells and tissues

Abstract

At present, drug development and validation is still a time consuming and cost intensive process. For highly efficient target validation, drug safety as well as drug screening, innovative cell and tissue based sensors provide powerful tools that can be applied in a very early phase of the drug development cycle and that significantly reduce costs by minimizing the failure rate of drug candidates at later stages. The combination of Micro Systems Technology (MST) and Nanotechnology (NT) as well as their integration with living cells and tissues allows the development of highly efficient biological Micro-Electrode-Mechanical- Systems (bioMEMS) or biosensors for functional real-time monitoring. The following chapter gives an overview of various different types of biosensors and describes several recording techniques and the practical application of biosensors for screening of multiple physiological parameters under high-content and high-throughput conditions. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.