Conventional systematically-administered drugs distribute evenly throughout the body, get degraded and excreted rapidly while crossing many biological barriers, leaving minimum amounts of the drugs at pathological sites. Controlled drug delivery aims to deliver drugs to the target sites at desired rates and time, thus enhancing the drug efficacy, pharmacokinetics, and bioavailability while maintaining minimal side effects. Due to a number of unique advantages of the recent microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology, microfluidic lab-on-a-chip has provided unprecedented opportunities for controlled drug delivery. Drugs can be efficiently delivered to the target sites at desired rates in a well-controlled manner by microfluidic platforms via integration, implantation, localization, automation, and precise control of various microdevice parameters. These features accordingly make reproducible, on-demand, and tunable drug delivery become feasible. On-demand self-tuning dynamic drug delivery systems have shown great potential for personalized drug delivery. This review presents an overview of recent advances in controlled drug delivery using microfluidic platforms. The review first briefly introduces microfabrication techniques of microfluidic platforms, followed by detailed descriptions of numerous microfluidic drug delivery systems that have significantly advanced the field of controlled drug delivery. Those microfluidic systems can be separated into four major categories, namely drug carrier-free micro-reservoir-based drug delivery systems, highly integrated carrier-free microfluidic lab-on-a-chip systems, drug carrier-integrated microfluidic systems, and microneedles. Microneedles can be further categorized into five different types, i.e. solid, porous, hollow, coated, and biodegradable microneedles, for controlled transdermal drug delivery. At the end, we discuss current limitations and future prospects of microfluidic platforms for controlled drug delivery.

常规的系统给药药物在人体中分布均匀，降解并迅速排泄，同时穿越了许多生物屏障，使病理部位的药物残留量降至最低。受控的药物递送旨在以所需的速率和时间将药物递送至靶位点，从而增强药物功效，药代动力学和生物利用度，同时保持最小的副作用。由于最近的微流控芯片实验室技术的许多独特优势，微流控芯片实验室为控制药物的输送提供了前所未有的机会。通过微流体平台，通过各种微设备参数的集成，植入，定位，自动化和精确控制，可以以良好控制的方式将药物以所需的速率有效地传递到目标部位。因此，这些功能使可重现，按需和可调的药物输送变得可行。按需自调整动态药物输送系统已显示出个性化药物输送的巨大潜力。这篇综述概述了使用微流控平台进行药物控制的最新进展。这篇综述首先简要介绍了微流控平台的微制造技术，然后详细描述了许多微流控药物输送系统，这些系统已大大推动了受控药物输送领域的发展。这些微流体系统可以分为四个主要类别，即无药物载体的基于微储器的药物输送系统，高度集成的无载体微芯片实验室系统，与药物载体集成的微流体系统和微针。可以将微针进一步分为五种类型，即固体，多孔，中空，包被的和可生物降解的微针，以控制经皮给药。最后，我们讨论了用于控制药物递送的微流控平台的当前局限性和未来前景。