An integrated inertial microfluidic vortex sorter for tunable sorting and purification of cells

Abstract

Sorting of target cells from complex cellular samples into a high-purity product is challenging yet essential for downstream cell biology research and clinical diagnostics. Inertial microfluidics is an emerging technology attracting a lot of interest for passive and label-free sorting of cells with high throughput. Here, we introduce an inertial microfluidic device based on our vortex sorting platform for continuous size-based double sorting and purification of the larger target cells from the smaller background cells. Our device uses a microscale chamber with three outlets as a sorting unit, and integrates it into a specific topology to enable double sorting and purification functionalities. With properly designed fluidic resistance network and optimized flow conditions, we demonstrated continuous sorting of spiked human cancer stem-like cells from human blood with >90% efficiency and >1,500× enhanced purity, as well as removal of red blood cells with ~99.97% efficiency. We envision this integrated vortex-aided sorter can serve as a viable tool for size-based sorting of large target cells from complex cellular samples. Furthermore, this vortex-aided sorting platform can be integrated into more sophisticated topology with versatile functions for other cell sorting applications.