Novel toxicology detectors

Initially, antibiotics work well, but they impose strong selective pressure on pathogens, inducing them to mutate in order to survive. As a result, novel strategies are required for combating bacterial infections. Over the past few years, new drug-delivery systems based on nanomaterial carriers have been designed and tested for their efficacy in killing bacteria. However, the employed strategies are inefficient at providing sufficient information on the toxicological outcome of drug interventions.

Existing methods only evaluate the overall survival of bacteria following drug administration, and not the events that take place at the single-cell level, potentially leading to erroneous interpretations. Seeking to address this limitation, researchers on the EU-funded NANOTESTS project propose to develop paper-based microfluidic detectors for the screening of drug-resistant bacteria.

Microfluidic devices based on paper are inexpensive to produce and can provide information on the toxicological impact of new drugs and chemicals on single bacteria. The activities of the project are focused on the identification of the appropriate surface chemistry for toxicological studies and on the development of microfluidic channels.

The long-term aim of the NANOTESTS study is to generate a microfluidic device that can perform multiplex toxicological evaluation of various drugs and gases. Using this system to evaluate the outcome of nanoparticle-based drug carriers is believed to produce robust solutions against antibiotic-resistant pathogens.