Abstract
Cancer, ranked as the second leading cause of global mortality with a prevalence of 1 in 6 deaths,
necessitates innovative approaches for effective treatment. Combinatorial drug therapy for cancer
treatment targets several key pathways simultaneously and potentially enhances anti-cancer efficacy
without intolerable side effects. However, it demands precise and accurate control of drug-dose
combinations and their release. In this study, we demonstrated a selectively cross-linked hydrogel-based
platform that can quantify and release drugs simultaneously for in-parallel cocktail drug screening. PDMS
was used as the flow channel substrate and the poly (ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) hydrogel array
was formed by UV exposure using the photomask. Employing our platform, cocktails of anticancer drugs
are precisely loaded and simultaneously released in-parallel into HCT-116 colon cancer cells, facilitating
combinatorial drug screening. The integration of an artificial intelligence-based complex system response
(AI-CSR) platform successfully identifies optimal drug-dose combinations from a pool of ten approved
drugs. Notably, our cocktail drug chip demonstrates exceptional efficiency, screening 155 drug-dose
combinations within a brief two and a half hours, a marked improvement over traditional methods.
Furthermore, the device exhibits low drug consumption, requiring a mere 1 μL per patch of chip. Thus, our
developed PDMS drug-loaded hydrogel platform presents a novel and expedited approach to quantifying
drug concentrations, promising to be a faster, efficient and more precise approach for conducting cocktail
drug screening experiments.