Improved Drug Discovery Using Nanoscopic Screening Process

Researchers are using nanotechnology to search for new cancer-fighting drugs through a process that could be up to 10,000 times faster than current methods.

The "Lab-on-Bead” process will screen millions of chemicals simultaneously using tiny plastic beads so small that 1,000 of them would fit across a human hair. Each bead carries a separate chemical, which can be identified later if it displays the characteristics needed to treat cancer cells. One batch of nanoscopic beads can replace the work of thousands of conventional, repetitive laboratory tests.

"This process allows the beads to do the work for you,” explained Dr. Jed Macosko, project director and assistant professor of physics at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC, USA). "By working at this scale, we will be able to screen more than a billion possible drug candidates per day as opposed to the current limit of hundreds of thousands per day.”

According to Dr. Macosko, the team and their collaborators at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) are developing a device that will automate the Lab-on-Bead process and permit parallel processing to attain faster screening results. The Wake Forest researchers are also working with biotechnologists at Harvard University (Boston, MA, USA) and Université Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, France), which are providing the chemicals being screened for drug candidates. Biotech company Nanomedica, Inc. (St. Paul, MN, USA) has shown interest in commercializing the process.

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Wake Forest University
Nanomedica