Extreme High Throughput Screening Via Massively Parallel Droplet Dispenser Arrays

项目总结 该项目旨在通过使筛选技术更有效地提高药物发现的效率。 无障碍。目前，通过测试大量未知化学物质来发现新的药物线索 看看是否有你想要的效果。因为这个过程有点慢，而且 这样的测试成本高昂，并不像应有的那样全面和广泛。我们正试图允许 化学反应将在微小的液滴中进行，这将大大降低 这些反应，并使它有可能同时运行更多的。 为了做到这一点，我们正在建造一种新的设备，一个巨大的液滴分配器阵列。该阵列 被设想得足够大，可以容纳你感兴趣的整套未知化学物质 测试。该阵列具有很强的fl灵活性。它可以快速地分配整套化学物质，分配许多 每种化学物质的不同浓度，以便我们可以fi和最有效的剂量，或分配 化学物质有多种不同的组合，这样我们就能发现哪些药物能很好地协同工作。 为了使这种自动售货机阵列工作，我们正在使用一种新型的微芯片技术 电路携带的是液体而不是电子。我们的液体电路的独特之处在于它们 可以像计算机一样进行计算。这最终对这个项目非常有用。 因为我们使用这种计算能力来控制大量的分配器。 一旦我们建立了液滴分配器，我们将在各种类型的普通筛查中对它们进行测试 实验。我们将尝试针对一种被认为在体内很重要的酶来测试一系列化学物质 癌症的扩散。作为这次测试的一部分，我们将尝试多种不同的变种 每种化学物质的浓度，到fi，以及它们开始生效的剂量。另外，我们 将开发另一种系统，这样我们就可以直接在结肠癌细胞上测试未知的化学物质， 看看是否有任何化学物质会杀死细胞或减缓它们的生长。在这些测试期间，我们将采取 利用该设备制造不同化学品和药物组合的能力。通常，癌症 需要用多种药物打击细胞才能起到积极的作用。测试不同的药物 这些癌细胞的结合将帮助我们发现有效结合药物的新方法。 这项工作与其说是关于药物测试本身，不如说是开发新的测试方法 可能是毒品。一旦我们可以证明我们的方法是有效的，我们就可以分享我们的方法，希望 帮助其他人更快地发现新的治疗方法。

PROJECT SUMMARY This project seeks to make drug discovery more effective by making the screening technology more accessible. Currently, new drug leads are discovered by testing a large number of unknown chemicals to see if any have the effect that you are looking for. Since this process is somewhat slow and expensive, such testing is not as thorough and widespread as it should be. We are trying to allow the chemical reactions to be run in microscopic droplets of liquid, which would greatly lower the cost of these reactions and make it possible to run many more together at once. To accomplish this, we are building a new device, a gigantic array of droplet dispensers. The array is envisioned to be large enough to hold the entire set of unknown chemicals that you are interested in testing. The array is very flexible. It can quickly dispense the entire set of chemicals, dispense many different concentrations of each chemical so that we can find the most effective dose, or dispense the chemicals in a variety of different combinations so that we can discover which drugs work well together. In order to make this array of dispensers work, we are using a new type of microchip technology where the circuits carry liquids instead of electrons. What is unique about our liquid circuits is that they can perform computations much like a computer can. This ends up being very useful for this project because we use this computational power to control the large array of dispensers. Once we build the droplet dispensers, we will test them out in various types of common screening experiments. We will try testing a library of chemicals against an enzyme that thought to be important in the spread of cancer. As part of this testing, we will try the variation where we try many different concentrations of each chemical, to find the dosage at which they start to become effective. Also, we will develop another system so that we can test our unknown chemicals directly on colon cancer cells, to see if any chemicals will kill the cells or slow down their growth. During these tests, we will take advantage of the device's ability to make different combinations of chemicals and drugs. Often, cancer cells need to be hit with multiple drugs in order to have a positive effect. Testing different drug combinations on these cancer cells will help us to discover new ways to combine drugs effectively. This work is less about the drug testing itself, but rather it's more about developing new ways to test possible drugs. Once we can show that our methods work, we can share our methods and hopefully help others discover new cures more quickly.