Microfluidic probes in the treatment of brain-related diseases.

Many new therapeutic compounds have been developed that target malignancies and other disorders of the brain. However, delivering these compounds to diseased tissue remains a difficult challenge. One option for local drug delivery in the brain is direct infusion of the compounds through a catheter into the brain parenchyma. Over the last decade, new infusion catheters have been developed to improve this delivery method. Some of these catheters are needles or cannulas that have been modified specifically to increase the infusion rate that can be achieved without leakage of the infusate out of the brain. Other new catheters have been fabricated using micromachining techniques adapted from electronics manufacturing. These microfabricated catheters can achieve comparable infusion rates as standard needles, but they also can incorporate features that would be difficult to build into needles or cannulas to improve drug delivery. This article reviews the development of these devices, their performance in preclinical studies and their potential benefits to neural drug delivery.