Evaluating nanomedicine with microfluidics

Translational Nanomedicines Across Human Reproductive Organs Modeling on Microfluidic Chips: State-of-the-Art and Future Prospects

Forecasting the consequence of nanoparticles (NPs) and therapeutically significant molecules before materializing for human clinical trials is a mainstay for drug delivery and screening processes. One of the noteworthy obstacles that has prevented the clinical translation of NP-based drug delivery systems and novel drugs is the lack of effective preclinical platforms. As a revolutionary technology, the organ-on-a-chip (OOC), a coalition of microfluidics and tissue engineering, has surfaced as an alternative to orthodox screening platforms. OOC technology recapitulates the structural and physiological features of human organs along with intercommunications between tissues on a chip. The current review discusses the concept of microfluidics and confers cutting-edge fabrication processes for chip designing. We also outlined the advantages of microfluidics in analyzing NPs in terms of characterization, transport, and degradation in biological systems. The review further elaborates the scope and research on translational nanomedicines in human reproductive organs (testis, placenta, uterus, and menstrual cycle) by taking the advantages offered by microfluidics and shedding light on their potential future implications. Finally, we accentuate the existing challenges for clinical translation and scale-up dynamics for microfluidics chips and emphasize its future perspectives.

Acoustofluidic black holes for multifunctional in-droplet particle manipulation

Acoustic black holes offer superior capabilities for slowing down and trapping acoustic waves for various applications such as metastructures, energy harvesting, and vibration and noise control. However, no studies have considered the linear and nonlinear effects of acoustic black holes on micro/nanoparticles in fluids. This study presents acoustofluidic black holes (AFBHs) that leverage controlled interactions between AFBH-trapped acoustic wave energy and particles in droplets to enable versatile particle manipulation functionalities, such as translation, concentration, and patterning of particles. We investigated the AFBH-enabled wave energy trapping and wavelength shrinking effects, as well as the trapped wave energy-induced acoustic radiation forces on particles and acoustic streaming in droplets. This study not only fills the gap between the emerging fields of acoustofluidics and acoustic black holes but also leads to a class of AFBH-based in-droplet particle manipulation toolsets with great potential for many applications, such as biosensing, point-of-care testing, and drug screening.

Microfluidic nanomaterials: From synthesis to biomedical applications

Microfluidic platforms gain popularity in biomedical research due to their attractive inherent features, especially in nanomaterials synthesis. This review critically evaluates the current state of the controlled synthesis of nanomaterials using microfluidic devices. We describe nanomaterials' screening in microfluidics, which is very relevant for automating the synthesis process for biomedical applications. We discuss the latest microfluidics trends to achieve noble metal, silica, biopolymer, quantum dots, iron oxide, carbon-based, rare-earth-based, and other nanomaterials with a specific size, composition, surface modification, and morphology required for particular biomedical application. Screening nanomaterials has become an essential tool to synthesize desired nanomaterials using more automated processes with high speed and repeatability, which can't be neglected in today's microfluidic technology. Moreover, we emphasize biomedical applications of nanomaterials, including imaging, targeting, therapy, and sensing. Before clinical use, nanomaterials have to be evaluated under physiological conditions, which is possible in the microfluidic system as it stimulates chemical gradients, fluid flows, and the ability to control microenvironment and partitioning multi-organs. In this review, we emphasize the clinical evaluation of nanomaterials using microfluidics which was not covered by any other reviews. In the future, the growth of new materials or modification in existing materials using microfluidics platforms and applications in a diversity of biomedical fields by utilizing all the features of microfluidic technology is expected.

Targeting Trained Innate Immunity With Nanobiologics to Treat Cardiovascular Disease

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Multifunctional biomolecule nanostructures for cancer therapy

Biomolecule-based nanostructures are inherently multifunctional and harbour diverse biological activities, which can be explored for cancer nanomedicine. The supramolecular properties of biomolecules can be precisely programmed for the design of smart drug delivery vehicles, enabling efficient transport in vivo, targeted drug delivery and combinatorial therapy within a single design. In this Review, we discuss biomolecule-based nanostructures, including polysaccharides, nucleic acids, peptides and proteins, and highlight their enormous design space for multifunctional nanomedicines. We identify key challenges in cancer nanomedicine that can be addressed by biomolecule-based nanostructures and survey the distinct biological activities, programmability and in vivo behaviour of biomolecule-based nanostructures. Finally, we discuss challenges in the rational design, characterization and fabrication of biomolecule-based nanostructures, and identify obstacles that need to be overcome to enable clinical translation.

Organ-on-a-Chip: A Preclinical Microfluidic Platform for the Progress of Nanomedicine

Despite the progress achieved in nanomedicine during the last decade, the translation of new nanotechnology-based therapeutic systems into clinical applications has been slow, especially due to the lack of robust preclinical tissue culture platforms able to mimic the in vivo conditions found in the human body and to predict the performance and biotoxicity of the developed nanomaterials. Organ-on-a-chip (OoC) platforms are novel microfluidic tools that mimic complex human organ functions at the microscale level. These integrated microfluidic networks, with 3D tissue engineered models, have been shown high potential to reduce the discrepancies between the results derived from preclinical and clinical trials. However, there are many challenges that still need to be addressed, such as the integration of biosensor modules for long-time monitoring of different physicochemical and biochemical parameters. In this review, recent advances on OoC platforms, particularly on the preclinical validation of nanomaterials designed for cancer, as well as the current challenges and possible future directions for an end-use perspective are discussed.

Ex vivo isolated human vessel perfusion system for the design and assessment of nanomedicines targeted to the endothelium

Endothelial cells play a central role in the process of inflammation. Their biologic relevance, as well as their accessibility to IV injected therapeutics, make them a strong candidate for treatment with molecularly-targeted nanomedicines. Typically, the properties of targeted nanomedicines are first optimized in vitro in cell culture and then in vivo in rodent models. While cultured cells are readily available for study, results obtained from isolated cells can lack relevance to more complex in vivo environments. On the other hand, the quantitative assays needed to determine the impact of nanoparticle design on targeting efficacy are difficult to perform in animal models. Moreover, results from animal models often translate poorly to human systems. To address the need for an improved testing platform, we developed an isolated vessel perfusion system to enable dynamic and quantitative study of vascular-targeted nanomedicines in readily obtainable human vessels isolated from umbilical cords or placenta. We show that this platform technology enables the evaluation of parameters that are critical to targeting efficacy (including flow rate, selection of targeting molecule, and temperature). Furthermore, biologic replicates can be easily produced by evaluating multiple vessel segments from the same human donor in independent, modular chambers. The chambers can also be adapted to house vessels of a variety of sizes, allowing for the subsequent study of vessel segments in vivo following transplantation into immunodeficient mice. We believe this perfusion system can help to address long-standing issues in endothelial targeted nanomedicines and thereby enable more effective clinical translation.

Advances in Computational Fluid Mechanics in Cellular Flow Manipulation: A Review

Recently, remarkable developments have taken place, leading to significant improvements in microfluidic methods to capture subtle biological effects down to single cells. As microfluidic devices are getting sophisticated, design optimization through experimentations is becoming more challenging. As a result, numerical simulations have contributed to this trend by offering a better understanding of cellular microenvironments hydrodynamics and optimizing the functionality of the current/emerging designs. The need for new marketable designs with advantageous hydrodynamics invokes easier access to efficient as well as time-conservative numerical simulations to provide screening over cellular microenvironments, and to emulate physiological conditions with high accuracy. Therefore, an excerpt overview on how each numerical methodology and associated handling software works, and how they differ in handling underlying hydrodynamic of lab-on-chip microfluidic is crucial. These numerical means rely on molecular and continuum levels of numerical simulations. The current review aims to serve as a guideline for researchers in this area by presenting a comprehensive characterization of various relevant simulation techniques.

Microfluidic-Based Platform for the Evaluation of Nanomaterial-Mediated Drug Delivery: From High-Throughput Screening to Dynamic Monitoring

Nanomaterial-based drug delivery holds tremendous promise for improving targeting capacity, biodistribution, and performance of therapeutic/diagnostic agents. Accelerating the clinical translation of current nanomedicine requires an in-depth understanding of the mechanism underlying the dynamic interaction between nanomaterials and cells in a physiological/pathophysiological-relevant condition. The introduction of the advanced microfluidic platform with miniaturized, well-controlled, and high-throughput features opens new investigation and application opportunities for nanomedicine evaluation. This review highlights the current state-of-theart in the field of 1) microfluidic-assisted in vitro assays that are capable of providing physiological-relevant flow conditions and performing high-throughput drug screening, 2) advanced organ-on-a-chip technology with the combination of microfabrication and tissue engineering techniques for mimicking microenvironment and better predicting in vivo response of nanomedicine, and 3) the integration of microdevice with various detection techniques that can monitor cell-nanoparticle interaction with high spatiotemporal resolution. Future perspectives regarding optimized on-chip disease modeling and personalized nanomedicine screening are discussed towards further expanding the utilization of the microfluidic-based platform in assessing the biological behavior of nanomaterials.

Evaluating Nanoparticles in Preclinical Research Using Microfluidic Systems

Nanoparticles (NPs) have found a wide range of applications in clinical therapeutic and diagnostic fields. However, currently most NPs are still in the preclinical evaluation phase with few approved for clinical use. Microfluidic systems can simulate dynamic fluid flows, chemical gradients, partitioning of multi-organs as well as local microenvironment controls, offering an efficient and cost-effective opportunity to fast screen NPs in physiologically relevant conditions. Here, in this review, we are focusing on summarizing key microfluidic platforms promising to mimic in vivo situations and test the performance of fabricated nanoparticles. Firstly, we summarize the key evaluation parameters of NPs which can affect their delivery efficacy, followed by highlighting the importance of microfluidic-based NP evaluation. Next, we will summarize main microfluidic systems effective in evaluating NP haemocompatibility, transport, uptake and toxicity, targeted accumulation and general efficacy respectively, and discuss the future directions for NP evaluation in microfluidic systems. The combination of nanoparticles and microfluidic technologies could greatly facilitate the development of drug delivery strategies and provide novel treatments and diagnostic techniques for clinically challenging diseases.

Electrochemical paper-based microfluidic device for high throughput multiplexed analysis

A disposable microfluidic electrochemical paper-based device for multiplexed analysis based on sixteen independent microfluidic channels with electrochemical detection is proposed. A major advantage of this work was the non-necessary use of a wax printer for devices manufacturing which has a high cost of operation. In addition, a commercial multiplexing module was used that has the multiplexing capability of 8-16 channels and, for the first time using this module, the strategy of multiplexing both the working and reference electrodes were used. These sixteen channels with the respective sensors can be operated employing one or multiple electrochemical techniques with good repeatability and reproducibility for high throughput analysis. As a proof of concept, the electrochemical performance of device was tested with ferrocenecarboxylic acid solution employing cyclic voltammetry, square-wave voltammetry, differential-pulse voltammetry and chronoamperometry. This innovative sensing platform presented capacity of production in large scale and application for clinical tests with safety and short time of assays. A biosensor was constructed using glucose oxidase on the platform for the glucose determination in urine as a non-invasive strategy. The analytical curve was linear in the glucose concentration range from 1.0 × 10^-4 mol L^-1 to 4 × 10^-2 mol L^-1, with a limit of detection of 3 × 10^-5 mol L^-1.