Lab-On-A-Chip for the Development of Pro-/Anti-Angiogenic Nanomedicines to Treat Brain Diseases

There is a huge demand for pro-/anti-angiogenic nanomedicines to treat conditions such as ischemic strokes, brain tumors, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Nanomedicines are therapeutic particles in the size range of 10–1000 nm, where the drug is encapsulated into nano-capsules or adsorbed onto nano-scaffolds. They have good blood–brain barrier permeability, stability and shelf life, and able to rapidly target different sites in the brain. However, the relationship between the nanomedicines’ physical and chemical properties and its ability to travel across the brain remains incompletely understood. The main challenge is the lack of a reliable drug testing model for brain angiogenesis. Recently, microfluidic platforms (known as “lab-on-a-chip” or LOCs) have been developed to mimic the brain micro-vasculature related events, such as vasculogenesis, angiogenesis, inflammation, etc. The LOCs are able to closely replicate the dynamic conditions of the human brain and could be reliable platforms for drug screening applications. There are still many technical difficulties in establishing uniform and reproducible conditions, mainly due to the extreme complexity of the human brain. In this paper, we review the prospective of LOCs in the development of nanomedicines for brain angiogenesis–related conditions.