Cell-based screenings of drugs and chemicals, such as screenings for new drug candidates and toxicity screenings, are widely used in pharma, biotechnology and cosmetic industry as well as in fundamental and translational research. Droplet-Microarray platform offers a perfect solution for performing fast, affordable and reliable screenings of different types of compounds. Panels of compound libraries of interest printed on solid carrier can be purchased in customized designs where combinations and concentrations of substances can be defined by a customer. Such libraries can be added to Droplet-Microarray containing cells in single step enabling simultaneous initiation of screen on the whole cell chip within minutes of time. Due to standard format and transparency of Droplet-Microarray the phenotype changes in response to the treatment can be analyzed using high content microscopy in combination with conventional staining or immunofluorescence techniques.
The field of personalized medicine is rapidly developing area, where the individual treatment of patient are facilitated by analyzing patient material in order to come up with individual treatment. A lot of progress has been done in the field of personal omics profiling. However, it is not always possible to predict the outcome of the treatment based on the data obtained in omics profiling. Direct testing of patient cells with panels of drugs and their combinations is gaining popularity. One of the example is drug sensitivity and resistant testing, where tumor cells from patient biopsies are tested against the combination of anti-neoplastic drugs. The main limitation of this test is restricted amount of patient material, which is often not enough for performing big screens. Droplet-Microarray offers a solution for screenings of minute amount of cells at the same time providing high throughput allowing for more drugs and combinations to be tested on a single patient biopsy.
