High-content screening in microfluidic devices.

Background: Miniaturization is the key to advancing the state of the art in high-content screening (HCS) in order to enable dramatic cost savings through reduced usage of expensive biochemical reagents and to enable large-scale screening on primary cells. Microfluidic technology offers the potential to enable HCS to be performed with an unprecedented degree of miniaturization.

Methods: This perspective highlights a real-world example from the authors’ work of HCS assays implemented in a highly miniaturized microfluidic format. The advantages of this technology are discussed, including cost savings, high-throughput screening on primary cells, improved accuracy, the ability to study complex time-varying stimuli, and ease of automation, integration and scaling.

Results: The reader will understand the capabilities of anew microfluidics-based platform for HCS and the advantages it provides over conventional plate-based HCS.

Conclusions: Microfluidics technology will drive significant advancements and broader usage and applicability of HCS in drug discovery.