The drug market is characterized by a strong competition. Pharmaceutical companies have spent increasing amounts of Research and Development money and have tried to improve their lead discovery and optimization processes with conventional methods without much success.

Microfluidics promises to be a better technology both for the production of new chemical entities and for screening them against a range of biological targets. Microfluidics allows the integration of chemistry and biology processes and avoids the huge overheads with compound management and storage.

SCREENING
Microfluidics is a disruptive technology for performing ultra-high throughput screening. It is the next step in laboratory automation, resulting in:

• improved data quality
• fewer experiments needed
• reduction of reagent consumption
• shorter reaction times
• faster hit-to-lead process
• reduction of costs
• avoidance of storage costs

Optimizing drugs will go much faster and better, and, even more important, the time to market for a drug will become much shorter.

By using a proprietary ultra thin surface treatment method, the Micronit chips will have a minimum adsorption of small molecules at the surface. This anti-stiction coating improves the reliability of the experiments. See Surface Modification for more information.

Micronit offers a platform for rapid engineering of prototypes, but we also manufacture devices in high volume. With our own class 1000 cleanroom facilities we supply high amounts of chips at one time.

Applications
Lab-on-a-chip is applied in various drug discovery and drug development applications, like:

• Combinational chemistry
• High throughput screening
• Cell manipulation
• Nanomedicine