Acoustofluidic separation of cells and particles

Mengxi Wu,Tony Jun Huang,Rui Fang,Joseph Rufo,Zeyu Wang,Adem Ozcelik

doi:10.1038/s41378-019-0064-3

Mengxi Wu, Tony Jun Huang + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41378-019-0064-3

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Abstract

Acoustofluidics, the integration of acoustics and microfluidics, is a rapidly growing research field that is addressing challenges in biology, medicine, chemistry, engineering, and physics. In particular, acoustofluidic separation of biological targets from complex fluids has proven to be a powerful tool due to the label-free, biocompatible, and contact-free nature of the technology. By carefully designing and tuning the applied acoustic field, cells and other bioparticles can be isolated with high yield, purity, and biocompatibility. Recent advances in acoustofluidics, such as the development of automated, point-of-care devices for isolating sub-micron bioparticles, address many of the limitations of conventional separation tools. More importantly, advances in the research lab are quickly being adopted to solve clinical problems. In this review article, we discuss working principles of acoustofluidic separation, compare different approaches of acoustofluidic separation, and provide a synopsis of how it is being applied in both traditional applications, such as blood component separation, cell washing, and fluorescence activated cell sorting, as well as emerging applications, including circulating tumor cell and exosome isolation.

Highlights

Many advances in medicine over the past century can be attributed to the development of innovative techniques for separating particles and cells of interest from complex mixtures
Summary and prospective This review aims to give a comprehensive view of the state-of-art of acoustofluidic technology for the separation of nanoparticles, cancer cells, bacteria, extracellular vesicles, blood components, droplets, and other particles
While many improvements have been made to acoustofluidic separation technology over the past decade, there are still many limitations

Summary

Introduction

Many advances in medicine over the past century can be attributed to the development of innovative techniques for separating particles and cells of interest from complex mixtures. The development of penicillin, which has saved tens of millions of lives since its debut in World War II, would not have been possible without the efforts of scientists who discovered methods to isolate the drug from culture media[1]. Over the 15 years, improvements in the ability to isolate highly pure penicillin from culture media contributed to the rapid growth in the manufacturability of penicillin in the United States. Acoustofluidic[4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] (i.e., the fusion of acoustic and microfluidic) separation has increasingly been applied to address many challenges in biomedical research, in the areas of clinical diagnostics and therapeutics[12,13,14,15].

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