Microfluidics: Emerging prospects for anti-cancer drug screening

Figure 3 Comparison between conventional (macroscale) and microfluidic (Lab-on-a-Chip) technologies for cell-based assays. The advent of microfluidics and its integration into design micro-total analysis systems (μTAS) and Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC) devices is one of the most promising avenues to address the inherent complexity of cellular systems with massive experimental parallelization and analysis on a single cell level. LOC technologies promise greatly reduced equipment costs, simplified operation, increased sensitivity and throughput by implementing parallel processing principles and a vast miniaturized of on-chip components. Only low cell numbers and operational reagent volumes are required for LOC technology. It, in turn, opens up new prospects for high-throughput and high-content screening of anti-cancer drugs on patient derived specimens.