New microchip biosensors promote the development of therapeutic drugs

Researchers at Stanford have developed a new biosensor microchip that can accelerate the development of therapeutic drugs. These microchips are packaged in highly sensitive ' nanosensors ' for analyzing how proteins bind to another protein, an important step in determining the effectiveness and possible effects of a drug. potential.

A single centimeter-sized array of nanoscale sensors can simultaneously and continuously control the protein binding event thousands of times the current sensors. This new sensor can identify interactions with higher sensitivity and transport reactants much faster than today's 'gold standard ' gold method .

'You can make thousands, even tens of thousands of different proteins of interest on a chip and run protein-binding tests in one go, ' Gs. Shan Wang said.

' In theory, in one test, you can see the pressure of the drug with every protein in the human body, ' said Dr. Richard Gaster said, and the first author of the study was published in Nature Nanotechnology .

A microchip with an array of nano sensors (orange box).Four target proteins (Y) of drugs with nanotag (brown beads).

The utility of nano sensor arrays lies in two improvements. First, the use of ' nano-attachment - nanotag ' magnetically attached to the test protein - as a drug - increases the responsiveness of the reaction. Secondly, an analytical model that researchers developed allows them to correctly judge the end result of an interaction based on only a small amount of control information. Current control techniques are no more than 4 simultaneous interactions and this process may take hours.

' I think this technique has the potential to revolutionize the way we do biological tests ,' says Professor P.JUtz of Stanford University Medical Center.

Wang Stone's team members developed a magnetic nanoscale sensor a few years ago and explained its sensitivity in many experiments, in which they showed it could identify the biomarker of inter-protein It is related to mouse blood cancer at one-thousandth of the concentration that current techniques can identify. This study was published in Nature Medicine .

The researchers attached nanotag to the research protein. When the nanotag-binding proteins attached to another protein were attached to a nanosensor, magnetic nanotag changed the magnetic field around the nano sensor at a low level but in a different way confirmed by the detector (the device recognizes ).

GS. Gaster said ' we are experimenting with breast cancer drugs. The task of this drug is to attach the target protein to breast cancer cells as closely as possible. But we also want to know: how does that drug bind to unrelated proteins in the body? '

To determine this, researchers will place breast cancer proteins on nano-sensor arrays, along with proteins from the liver, lungs, kidneys, and any type of tissue of interest. They will take drugs that carry magnetic nanotags and see which proteins the drug will attach to - and how well it will bind.

' We can know the extent of drug binding to breast cancer cells and then to other cells in the body's tissues, organs ,' Gs. Gaster said. ' So we can begin to judge the diverse effects of this drug without putting it in the patient's body.'

The sensitivity increased during the identification process along with magnetic nanotags that allowed Gaster and Wang to determine not only when a link formed but also how strong they were.

' Protein speed when attached and released indicates the strength of the link '. That may be an important factor for many pharmaceuticals.

' I was surprised at the sensitivity achieved. These researchers will identify between 10 and 1000 molecules and that is quite surprising to me , 'Gs. Utz said. ' Nano sensor development is based on the same type of sensor found in a computer hard drive, ' Wang said. ' Because our chips are completely based on microelectronics and existing methods, the number of sensors on an area can be stacked up with a slightly higher cost, ' he said.

Although the chips used in the study are described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology there are more than 1000 sensors per square centimeter, GS. Wang says it doesn't matter when placing 10,000 sensors on a similar footprint.

' It can be stacked with more than 100,000 sensors per square centimeter, but still has not reached the limits of technology in the microelectronics industry. We can see a bright future for nano sensor arrays with superior features, like the fundamental technology that makes the current array of nano sensors, 'Gs. Wang shared.