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Precise isolation of circulating tumour cells

A novel hydrodynamic structure has been proposed to achieve one-step and label-free isolation of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) and cell-leukocyte fusion cells (CFCs) from whole blood.

The integrated microfluidic platform isolates rare CTCs and CFCs with high purity and high cell viability, enabling direct downstream analysis with single-cell RNA sequencing.

Researchers proposed a filter deterministic lateral displacement (filter-DLD) concept to achieve one-step and label-free CTCs and CFCs isolation.

The novel hydrodynamic structure is designed and simulated by multiphysics finite element analysis, which enables precise manipulation of cell motion.

The filter-DLD structure not only has a lower critical cell separation size than conventional DLD designs, but also achieves a higher depletion rate of smaller red blood cells, which make up the largest proportion of blood.

By combining the filter-DLD concept and the cascaded chip design, researchers fully explored the potential of rare cell sorting based on physical properties.

The integrated microfluidic platform demonstrated excellent performance for size-based cell separation, and achieved high separation efficiency (>96%), high cell purity (WBC removal rate 99.995%), high cell viability (>98%) and high processing rate (1 mL/min).

Using this platform, researchers analysed samples from non-small cell lung cancer patients. CTCs and tumour CFCs were efficiently collected, and changes in CTCs levels were used for treatment response monitoring.

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Image credit | SIAT

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