The teams of Prof Roland Brock and Wouter Verdurmen, PhD, Department of Biochemistry, Radboudumc, have recently implemented a versatile microfluidic platform that can be broadly employed to investigate drug delivery. Microfluidic systems are often designed specifically for certain applications. However, this is not always practical, especially in laboratories that are not specializing in the design of such systems. The researchers demonstrate that a single platform can be used both for specific targeting of carbonic anhydrase IX (CAIX) on tumor cells as well as serve as the basis for a bone-on-a-chip platform for the evaluation of mRNA delivery from colloidal biomaterials.
Valentina Palacio-Castañeda and Rik Oude Egberink
This publication shows that the platform can easily be adapted to study drug delivery across different disease areas and with different targeted therapies by controlling key parameters and high-resolution imaging. As such, the platform represents an important technology that may lead to a broader adoption of organ-on-a-chip technology in the field of drug delivery as an alternative to more classical cell-culture systems and in vivo studies.
The work has been published in Pharmaceutics in a Special Issue about ‘Drug Delivery in the Netherlands’: https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics13111944
