Application of Microfluidics in Drug Development from Traditional Medicine

Abstract

While there are many clinical drugs for prophylaxis and treatment, the search for those with low or no risk of side effects for the control of infectious and non-infectious diseases is a dilemma that cannot be solved by today’s traditional drug development strategies. The need for new drug development strategies is becoming increasingly important, and the development of new drugs from traditional medicines is the most promising strategy. Many valuable clinical drugs have been developed based on traditional medicine, including drugs with single active ingredients similar to modern drugs and those developed from improved formulations of traditional drugs. However, the problems of traditional isolation and purification and drug screening methods should be addressed for successful drug development from traditional medicine. Advances in microfluidics have not only contributed significantly to classical drug development but have also solved many of the thorny problems of new strategies for developing new drugs from traditional drugs. In this review, we provide an overview of advanced microfluidics and its applications in drug development (drug compound synthesis, drug screening, drug delivery, and drug carrier fabrication) with a focus on its applications in conventional medicine, including the separation and purification of target components in complex samples and screening of active ingredients of conventional drugs. We hope that our review gives better insight into the potential of traditional medicine and the critical role of microfluidics in the drug development process. In addition, the emergence of new ideas and applications will bring about further advances in the field of drug development.

Nanotechnology-Based Diagnostics for Diseases Prevalent in Developing Countries: Current Advances in Point-of-Care Tests

“…Microfluidic systems have been shown to increase analysis speed and efficiency by automating the analysis process, reducing the consumption of samples or reagents (microfluidic systems typically work with microliter quantities of reagents) [ 43 ]. They can also be used to reduce human intervention in experiments [ 44 ], reduce experiment pollution [ 45 ], and allow for the efficient repeating of experiments through multiplexing [ 46 ]. Fluids in these microliter quantities have different behaviors compared to fluids on a macroscale; for example, they have low Reynolds or Grashof numbers.…”

Droplets microfluidics platform—A tool for single cell research

“…Moreover, droplet microfluidics is widely used in biomedical research due to their simple and easy operation and high-throughput encapsulation capability. For example, droplet microfluidics has been used in drug encapsulation ( Li et al, 2022 ; Chen et al, 2023 ), targeted drug delivery ( Jia et al, 2022 ; Sartipzadeh et al, 2022 ), and multi-functionalization of carriers ( Wu et al, 2010 ).…”

Droplet-Based Microfluidics: Applications in Pharmaceuticals

“…In another application, droplet-based microfluidics have been widely adopted for the synthesis of drug-loaded microcapsules for drug delivery, including site targeting and controlled release, in tumor therapy and pharmacological research [ 139 , 140 , 141 ]. Delivery is an important aspect of drug development.…”