Designing and Fabrication of Lab On a Chip for the Therapeutic Drug Monitoring of Erlotinib
Microfluidics and Biosensors are two principal fields that paved the way for the inception of Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) which provides early and cost-effective disease detection, from monitoring to treatment. LOC is a device that uses very small amounts of fluid on a microchip to do certain laboratory tests. These microfluidic devices use body fluids or solutions containing cells or cell parts to diagnose diseases. The main advantages of LOCs include dramatically reduced sample size, much shorter reaction and analysis time, high throughput, automation, and portability. The potential use of LOC technology in the medical domain includes early diagnostics, therapeutic drug monitoring, and personalized medicines. Currently, anticancer drugs are prescribed on the basis of body surface area, which can cause significant side effects such as chemo brain, anemia, infertility, organ failure, etc. Prevailing Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) techniques such as chromatography, bioassay, etc are time-consuming, expensive, and need expertise. As an alternative an LOC device was designed, which helps in the continuous TDM of antineoplastic drug Erlotinib Hydrochloride (ERL). The electrode system detects homogeneously mixed ERL in the blood interface and the organic solvent. Using a module in the COMSOL Multiphysics ® software downloaded from I-STEM like Microfluidics module which helped in performing simulations of the proposed lab-on-a-chip device, various passive micromixers were simulated. Their velocity and concentration profile were analyzed for studying the efficiency of mixing.
