Summary

The increase in average age of Europeans in the next decades will steadily increase. This means that a strongly increased number of old-age related diseases will occur, like brain and heart malfunctioning and/or neurological diseases. Hence, there will be a huge pressure to develop cheap and effective drugs for these diseases.

Among others, two important issues play a role. Drugs are often based on combinations of specific peptides. If the effective peptides in a new drug have been determined, e.g. via electrical evaluation of brain tissue with and without drugs, the process of synthesis of these specific peptides has to be carried out. Evaluation and synthesis requires expensive equipment, and e.g. the reaction times to create peptides are large because of the amounts used at macro scale. At micro scale this could revolutionize evaluation of drugs and synthesis of peptides for use in drugs.

Based on previous PATENT research in BioMEMS (WP1) and (analogue) fluidic modelling (WP2), we now want to harvest this expertise of partners and cooperation, in the development of a digital microfluidic platform (using so-called droplets [1-3] ) which is suitable for electrical analysis of  biological material, as well as a production platform for peptides. We have included three European companies, two of which are SMEs, who are involved in these two application areas in which the digital droplet platform can be used. A microelectrode Array (MEA) for analysing cell material is already available, and is shown in figure 1a. Within BioDrop, the latter will be extended with a droplet transport/delivery system. The basic setup of a new droplet-based peptide synthesizer is shown in figure 1b.

a)

b)

Digital microfluidics, in the form of droplets, is a very promising approach to develop for instance production platforms for bio-chemical applications. Europe is lagging seriously behind in this very flexible and software-controllable microfluidics, as compared to the US. As these production platforms will operate in a mass-production environment and are relatively costly, their reliability and on-line testing facilities should be very high to avoid dropout and incorrectly constructed bio-chemicals which could result in high claims. In this sense, these applications contrast to simple disposable BioMEMS; packaging is here not an issue as the peptides are anticipated to be sold on a glass substrate.

As one application, a fully software-controllable multi-peptide synthesizer is chosen, to be developed at micro scale. It will consist of a transparent top substrate with synthesized peptides to be sold, and a bottom Silicon-based BioMEMS with all required droplet operations, control electronics and  signal processing for automatic sensing, diagnostics, bio-chemical fluidic rerouting and cleansing.

In the other application, the analysis of bio cells is the key issue. To transport this material, again use is made of digital microfluidics. These innovative approaches require many experts in different areas, which have been found in the PATENT network.