The Role of Microsystems Integration Towards Point-of-Care Clozapine Treatment Monitoring in Schizophrenia

We present a perspective on microsystems integration aspects for concurrent cellular and molecular sensing in a lab-on-a-chip device. While of interest for a range of applications, very few-narrowly focused-examples of such devices can be found in the literature. Here, we approach the challenge from a systems level, considering sensor integration both in parallel and in series. Our study is specifically geared toward schizophrenia treatment, where concurrent blood monitoring of the antipsychotic clozapine and white blood cells could lead to improved treatment outcomes. We evaluate the critical system components for either design, namely, plasma skimming (parallel) and in-blood clozapine detection (series). We find that plasma skimming is infeasible but, for the first time, demonstrate direct detection of clozapine in whole blood. With a corresponding series-integrated microsystem, we finally demonstrate downstream white blood cell analysis on the same samples using impedance cytometry. We, thus, present the first lab-on-a-chip device capable of labeland reagent-free concurrent sensing of cellular and molecular markers.