Lab-on-a-Chip for anticancer drug screening using quantum dots probe based apoptosis assay

Quantitative data acquisition of the drug induced cell apoptosis is one of the most important aspects of anticancer drug assessment. Traditional methods using photo-bleachable organic dyes to detect the apoptotic cells, may lead to some difficulties in long time observation of the cells. Moreover, the culture plates inevitably require large number of cells resulting in inefficiency in analysis of fewer cell samples such as a patient's own cells. To address these problems, we developed a microfluidic platform to assess the adherent cell cytotoxicity for anticancer drug screening using Annexin V conjugated quantum dots and Calcein AM as dual apoptotic probes. The results showed that camptothecin possessed more potent cytotoxic effect on these adherent tumor cells. Interestingly, the MCF-7 exhibited a certain resistance to these two anti-tumor drugs. For the first time, we achieved the evaluation of the impacts of model anti-cancer drugs on different adherent tumor cell lines using bio-functional quantum dots probe based cytotoxicity assays in a microfluidic device.