Innovative Chip-Based Platform for Accelerated Drug Discovery
Early-stage drug discovery is typically slow and costly. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have built a chip-based platform that arranges extremely small nanodroplets—about 200 nanoliters each and using roughly 300 cells per test—allowing thousands of compounds to be synthesized, tested, and analyzed on the same device. The team reports their results in Angewandte Chemie.
Challenges in Traditional High-Throughput Screening
Current high-throughput screening workflows separate synthesis, biological testing, and characterization into resource-heavy steps. These processes usually require large pharmaceutical budgets, take years to complete, and consume substantial amounts of materials, putting them out of reach for many academic labs and smaller companies, the KIT team notes.
Integration of Stages into a Single Nanodroplet Array
The new system integrates those previously distinct stages into a single nanodroplet array. By scaling experiments down from the microliter to the nanoliter range—a 1,000-fold reduction—the researchers use a direct-to-biology approach th...