A printable, hydrogel-based drug-screening platform that can differentiate true enzyme inhibitors from promiscuous aggregating inhibitors has been developed by chemical engineers at McMaster University.
Associate professor Todd Hoare and Rabia Mateen, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering, say that their printed paper-based device can speed up and improve the accuracy of the drug screening process. Their work, which could also be used to diagnose diseases, identify environmental contaminants, and pinpoint biological warfare agents, is described in a paper in Nature Communications today.
According to the team, the way the first stage in drug screening is currently performed results in many inaccurate results, with as many as 95% of drug candidates having no chance of becoming a useful drug. In most cases, these inaccuracies arise from the candidate drugs sticking together during the screen to create particles that physically, instead of chemically, block the activity of the molecule targeted by the drug.
Hoare and Mateen’s new printable hydrogel can form a cage around the target molecule so drug particles formed can't access the target molecule and trigger the inaccurate result. Instead, only drugs that chemically bind to the target molecule are allowed into the hydrogel to give a positive result.
"We had already developed the printing method, but were not sure what to do with the materials," Mateen said. "Reading about this significant issue in the area of drug screening made me realize that these materials could directly address this problem in a simple and effective way."