Recent advancements in loco-regional therapy are revolutionizing the point-of-care (POC) drug delivery field, enhancing the convenience, comfort, and effectiveness of these devices for patients. New anticancer drugs have improved the therapy, but there is still significant work to be done in order to selectively target tumour cells. To bridge this gap, here, we present a minimally invasive tool based on optical fibers (OFs) integrated in a microfluidic device for light-triggered loco regional delivery of drug-loaded particles. Specifically, we, here, selected the Lab on Fiber (LOF) technology as an attractive option to guide light and trigger the drug release. LOF, indeed, enables precise drug dosing and targeted transport, laying the foundation for mini-invasive platforms in light-activated loco-regional drug delivery. The platform includes drug-loaded carriers covalently attached on the OF surface through a photocleavable linker. The OF platform has been designed to spread light from the core region towards the cladding area in order to achieve enough power density to photo-cleave the linker and release the carrier. To this aim, side-emitting and core-offset OFs optrodes have been designed, fabricated and characterized achieving power density and scattering efficiency of 30% and 5mW/cm2 and 24.9% and 4.64mW/cm2. OFs were integrated into a microfluidic device and the particle release upon light activation was quantified. The side-emitting OF microfluidic system, designed for Hepatocellular cancer therapy, released 2.60μg/ml of carriers, while the core-offset OF microfluidic system, for Breast cancer treatment, released 1.06μg/ml of carriers. This approach holds potential for improving cancer treatment outcomes
The need for miniaturized biological sensors which can be easily integrated into medical needles and catheters for in vivo liquid biopsies with ever-increasing performances has stimulated the interest of researchers in Lab-on-Fiber (LOF) technology. In this framework, the integration of Metasurfaces (MSs) on the tip of the optical fiber (Optical Fiber Meta- Tip, OFMT) has represented a major breakthrough. Indeed, we showed that a suitably designed plasmonic OFMT biosensor significantly outperforms standard plasmonic ones due to the advanced light wave manipulation of MSs. Here, to further improve the sensing performances, we propose a novel class of LOF optrodes for labelled biosensing based on dielectric fluorescence enhancing OFMT. We envision a single fiber probe with integrated a Silicon MS on its tip as a light coupled substrate that illuminates the sample and simultaneously collects the enhanced emission from the dye molecules labeling the biological target. We present a numerical environment to compute the fluorescence enhancement factor collected by a multi-mode-fiber, when on its tip a Silicon MS is laid, consisting of an array of cylindrical nanoantennas. According to the numerical results, a suitable design of the dielectric MS allows for a fluorescence enhancement up to three orders of magnitudes. Moreover, a feasibility study is carried out to verify the possibility to fabricate the designed MSs on the termination of multimode optical fibers using electron beam lithography followed by reactive ion etching. This work provides the main guidelines for the development of advanced LOF devices based on the fluorescence enhancement for labeled biosensing.
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