Fig. 5.

Workflow for a drug screening setup with breast tumor biopsy sample. Blood samples are transferred to the microfluidic chip and incubated with chemical compound libraries. The most efficient drug combination should be determined based on different breast cancer biomarker and phenotypic data. The effect of compounds on blood samples is measured using a variety of cell-based readout and pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) assays. These detection assays can be used for monitoring the cell viability/toxicity and cellular function by the measurement of homogenous changes in absorbance, fluorescence- or luminescence-based gene reporter assays. PK/PD can provide information to simulate drug responses in the human body.