Design of two Inertial-based microfluidic devices for cancer cell separation from Blood: A serpentine inertial device and an integrated inertial and magnetophoretic device

Abstract

The separation of cancer cells from a heterogeneous biological sample such as blood plays a vital role in cancer study and future treatments. In this paper, we designed and investigated two microfluidic devices for cancer cell separation, including a serpentine inertial device and an integrated inertial-magnetophoretic device. Firstly, numerical modeling was carried out to study the fluid flow, particles’ trajectories in the inertial device. Then the device was fabricated using soft photolithography and suspension of two types of microparticles with the size of 10 and 15 µm were injected into the microchannel separately to investigate the particles’ trajectories and focusing behavior at different flow rates. Later, MCF7 as a type of cancer cells are mixed with the diluted blood sample, and the mixed cell suspension was introduced into this inertial chip with different flow rates. At 1000 µl /min, the highest purity of 84% and recovery rate of ∼ 89% for cancer cells were attained. Finally, to investigate the integration of the proposed inertial device with magnetic cell separation, a combined inertial and magnetophoretic device was fabricated, and by injecting the blood sample containing the nanoparticle-conjugated MCF7 cells, the purity and recovery rate of isolated cancer cells in the hybrid device improved in comparison to the inertial device to ∼ 92.5% and ∼ 94.5%, respectively.