Microfluidics for personalized drug screening of cancer

Abstract

Resistance to targeted therapies is a major clinical challenge in cancer treatment. Despite technological advances, robust biomarkers or platforms predictive of treatment response are lacking owing to the inherent nature of complex genomic landscape of carcinoma. Nevertheless, recent efforts centred on performing direct drug screening on patient-derived cells through their ex vivo expansion and maintenance have enabled personalized stratification of treatment modalities. Microfluidics is one such technology that allows high-throughput drug screening through parallelization and automation using small-volume sample. In this review, we present recent microfluidic platforms that have been successfully applied for the maintenance and expansion of patient-derived tumor cells spanning diverse cancer types and sources (solid tumors or liquid biopsies (circulating tumor cells)) for personalized drug screening applications.