4th ERA PerMed JTC about Personalized Medicine

The 4^th ERA PerMed JTC about personalized medicine is divided into 3 research areas. 

Microfluidics is highly relevant for the 2 first areas:

Research area 1: “Translating basic to clinical research and beyond”

With organ-on-chip technology, growing patient cells on a microfluidic chip is possible. The advantages of microfluidics are:

• The very precise control of the cell microenvironment, allowing more physiologically relevant experiments than with traditional cell culture
• The possibility to stick as closely as possible to the patient’s physiology
• The possibility to parallelize and automate the experiments

The main application of organ-on-chip technology in personalized medicine is drug screening, which identifies the most relevant drug for a specific patient. However, it can also be applied to biomaterial testing before implantation in the patient (as developed in the PANBioRA project) or to reproduce a pathology on a chip in a personalized manner.

Microfluidic lab-on-chips are also very interesting for the development of personalized treatments for patients, in particular for the analysis of samples from patients (blood, urine, saliva…, etc.) and the detection of various metabolites. They allow the automated and short-time parallelized analysis of various samples with very low volumes of samples. The same technology can be used for the personalized synthesis of treatments, like in the ElectroMed project.

Research area 2: Data, information and communication technology

Microfluidics is a choice ally for developing machine learning and systems controlled by artificial intelligence: the possibility of creating a highly reproducible environment makes this technology ideal for training an algorithm.