18 August 2009

1,000 chemical reactions at once

A University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) technique performs many chemical reactions at once, and this accelerates the drug discovery for cancer and other diseases.

Flasks, beakers, and hot plates may soon be outdated in chemistry labs. Instead of handling a few experiments on a bench top, scientists may simply pop a microchip into a computer and instantly run thousands of chemical reactions, with results literally shrinking the lab down to the size of a thumbnail.

Toward that end, UCLA researchers have developed technology to perform more than a thousand chemical reactions at once on a stamp-size, PC-controlled microchip, which could accelerate the identification of potential drug candidates for treating diseases like cancer. Their study appears in the 21 August edition of the journal Lab on a Chip and is available online.

A team of UCLA chemists, biologists, and engineers collaborated on the technology, which uses micro fluidics—the utilization of miniaturized devices to automatically handle and channel tiny amounts of liquids and chemicals invisible to the eye.

While traditionally only a few chemical reactions could happen on a chip, the research team pioneered a way to instigate multiple reactions, thus offering a new method to quickly screen which drug molecules may work most effectively with a targeted protein enzyme.

A thousand cycles of complex processes, including controlled sampling and mixing of a library of reagents and sequential micro channel rinsing, all took place on the microchip device and were over in just a few hours.

According to the researchers, the technology may open up many areas for biological and medicinal study.

For related information, go to www.isa.org/sensors.