Green Techniques for Medicinal Chemistry (Track)

DRUG SCREENING BY PRINTING BIOLOGY

Bruno Pignataro

Dipartimento di Fisica e Chimica, Università di Palermo, V.le delle Scienze, 90128, Palermo-Italy

Abstract

Drug screening is a complex, expensive and time-consuming process consisting of disease-based target identification in conjunction with high-throughput screening of chemical and natural product libraries. Conventional drug screening technologies require time and reagent consuming (micro-, nanoliter scale) instrumental tools and complex liquid handling robotics. In our group, we showed a low-cost and miniaturized drug screening methodology based on direct “Printing Biology” methods like Inkjet Printing and Dip Pen Lithography. We show the possibility to precisely deliver and write droptlet arrays containing protein targets with a resolution spanning from the picoliter to the femtoliter scale. We showed the possibility to produce gradients of concentration of possible drug targets directly on-chip. We carried out fluorescent detection for measuring target interaction with native fluorolabeled ligand by employing different high resolution transduction tools. Results from our multi-steps devices are in agreement with conventional microwell plate assays, confirming the ability of our chips to discriminate for instance the inhibitory activities of different drugs as well as the interaction of different biological systems.

REFERENCES

[1] Arrabito G, and Pignataro B, Inkjet printing methodologies for drug screening. Anal Chem(Letters) 2010; 82: 3104-7. [2] Giuseppe Arrabito, Stephanie Reisewitz, Leif Dehmelt, Philippe I. Bastiaens, Bruno Pignataro, Hendrik Schroeder, and Christof M. Niemeyer, Biochips for Cell Biology by Combined Dip-Pen Nanolithography and DNA-Directed Protein Immobilization, Small 9 (2013) 4243-4249.
[3] Yana Aleeva and Bruno Pignataro, Recent advances in upscalable wet methods and ink formulation for printed electronics, J. Mater. Chem. C 2 (2014) 6436 – 6453.
[4] Bruno Pignataro, Nano-structured molecular surfaces: advances in investigation and patterning tools (feature article invited by the Editor), J. Mater. Chem. 19 (2009) 3338–3350.
[5] Giuseppe Arrabito, Chiara Musumeci, Venera Aiello, Sebania Libertino, Giuseppe Compagnini, and Bruno Pignataro, On the Relationship between Jetted Inks and Printed Biopatterns: Molecular-Thin Functional Microarrays of Glucose Oxidase, Langmuir 25 (2009) 6312–6318.
[6] Giuseppe Arrabito, Clelia Galati, Sabrina Castellano and Bruno Pignataro, Luminometric sub-nanoliter droplet-to-droplet array (LUMDA) and its application to drug screening by phase I metabolism enzymes, Lab on a Chip 13 (2013) 68-72.
[7] Simone Fabiano and Bruno Pignataro, Selecting speed-dependent pathways for a programmable nanoscale texture by wet interfaces, Chem. Soc. Rev., 41 (2012) 6859–6873.