Research Of The Microelectronic Cell Sensor For Analysis Of Anti-cancer Drugs

Malignant tumor is a serious threat to human health and disease. The number of new cases increased greatly in recent years. Now, chemotherapy is still one of successful therapeutic methods to malignant tumors. Therefore, how to find inhibitors to grows and proliferations of cancer cells, and find drugs in prevention and treatment affection with abilities of killing cancer cells directly, are all very important issues for tumors therapy. With the quickly development of biomedical techniques, in vitro cultured cancer cell lines have become available bioassays for screening and evaluating anti-cancer drugs. At the same time, with the development of micro- and nano- technology, lots of micro- and nano-sensors have been used to measure tissue or cells directly. Electrical cell-substrate impedance sensor (ECIS) is just one of those kinds of cell-based biosensors, which can be used to detect cells physiological or pathological changes, such as cell impedance, membrane capacitance, and spatial characters in cell-substrate interface in different culture channels. The sensor can monitor interactions of cell proliferations to extracellular matrix, and the morphological changes of the attached cells, in a real-time and quantitative way by microampere current measurement.Based on analysis of the cell-substrate impedance models of the theoretic analysis, interdigital electrode arrays were fabricated by micro- electromechanial system (MEMS) in this paper. The sensor was equipped with sample giving system and control system. Anti-cancer drugs, such as ginseng saponin Rh2, were analyzed by applied it to cancer cells of human lung adenocarcinoma cell line A549 cultured on the electrodes. At the same time, methods of computer aided drug design of ligand and structure based pharmacophore modeling and molecular docking, was both used to analyze the drug induced apoptosis by effacing on cell apoptosis-related proteins, such as Bcl-2, Caspase-3, CKD2, and PKC. After all, the combine of the biomedical sensors with computer aided drug design was discussed as a potential plant form for deeply understanding the mechanisms of anti-cancer drugs such as ginseng saponin Rh2.Anyway, ginseng saponin Rh2 was applied to cancer cells of human lung adenocarcinoma cell line A549 in this research. Integrated with ligand and structure based pharmacophore modeling and molecular docking, a microelectronic sensor is designed, and it provides a viable real time and non-invasive platform for anti-cancer drugs screening and analysis.