Droplet Microarray: Miniaturized Platform for Biology and Chemistry

Miniaturization is essential in modern biology and chemistry. By reducing the scale of experiments, it is possible to perform a higher number of tests simultaneously, conserve valuable reagents, and enable more experiments using patients´ or stem cells. This shift towards smaller-scale experiments is revolutionizing cell screenings, personalized medicine, and the drug discovery.

Droplet Microarray (DMA) technology, developed at the KIT, is enabling researchers to conduct chemical and biological experiments at the nanoliter scale (100 -500 nL) and in higher throughput. This approach enhances high-throughput capabilities and also facilitates novel types of readouts (e.g. MALDI-MS or spectroscopy-based readouts) and applications. DMA technology can be also used for the high-throughput and miniaturized fabrication of cell spheroids and cell assembloids with complex 3D architecture, essential for advanced biological experiments.

Droplet Microarray (DMA) technology is also central to the chemBIOS approach, which integrates on-chip miniaturized combinatorial library synthesis with biological screenings on a single platform. This integration conserves reagents and cells, generates valuable biological and chemical data for machine learning analysis and structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies and therefore can accelerate the early drug discovery process.