Microfluidic platform for combinatorial synthesis in picolitre droplets

Abstract

This paper presents a droplet-based microfluidic platform for miniaturized combinatorial synthesis. As a proof of concept, a library of small molecules for early stage drug screening was produced. We present an efficient strategy for producing a 7 × 3 library of potential thrombin inhibitors that can be utilized for other combinatorial synthesis applications. Picolitre droplets containing the first type of reagent (reagents A₁, A₂, …, A_m) were formed individually in identical microfluidic chips and then stored off chip with the aid of stabilizing surfactants. These droplets were then mixed to form a library of droplets containing reagents A_1–m, each individually compartmentalized, which was reinjected into a second microfluidic chip and combinatorially fused with picolitre droplets containing the second reagent (reagents B₁, B₂, …, B_n) that were formed on chip. The concept was demonstrated with a three-component Ugi-type reaction involving an amine (reagents A_1–3), an aldehyde (reagents B_1–7), and an isocyanide (held constant), to synthesize a library of small molecules with potential thrombin inhibitory activity. Our technique produced 10⁶ droplets of each reaction at a rate of 2.3 kHz. Each droplet had a reaction volume of 3.1 pL, at least six orders of magnitude lower than conventional techniques. The droplets can then be divided into aliquots for different downstream screening applications. In addition to medicinal chemistry applications, this combinatorial droplet-based approach holds great potential for other applications that involve sampling large areas of chemical parameter space with minimal reagent consumption; such an approach could be beneficial when optimizing reaction conditions or performing combinatorial reactions aimed at producing novel materials.