Abstract
Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) carry a wealth of information on primary and metastatic tumors critical for precise cancer detection, monitoring, and treatment. Numerous microfluidic platforms have been developed in the past few years to capture these rare cells in patient bloodstream for deciphering the critical information needed. However, the practical need for a high-quality method of CTC isolation remains to be met. Herein, we demonstrate a novel multi-flow microfluidic device that is able to sensitively provide high purity (>87%) of separation outcome without labeling. Our device is constructed and configured based on the phenomenal effect of size-dependent inertial migration. The recovery rate of >93% has been achieved using spiked cancer cells at clinically relevant concentrations (10 cells per 5 mL and above). We have also successfully detected CTCs from 6 out of 8 non-small-cell-lung-cancer (NSCLC) patients, while none for 5 healthy control subjects. With these results, we envision our approach is a promising alternative for reliable CTC capture, and thus for facilitating the progress of extracting information from CTCs to personalize treatment strategies for solid tumor patients.
Highlights
Isolation of viable and intact circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is critical for implementing liquid biopsy which has shown their strong clinical implications as an alternative to tissue biopsy[1,2]
We report on a novel multi-flow microfluidic (MFM) system for the separation of CTCs with high purity
We systematically investigated the influence of flow rate ratio and total flow rate on the separation performance in terms of cutoff size
Summary
Isolation of viable and intact circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is critical for implementing liquid biopsy which has shown their strong clinical implications as an alternative to tissue biopsy[1,2]. These cells serve as promising biomarkers for cancer prognostics, monitoring treatment response, drug screening, and personalized medicine[3,4,5]. CTCs, on the other hand, can be accessed since they are tumor cells shed from primary and/or distant sites and circulate in the bloodstream[9]. Isolation of CTCs from blood is nontrivial, attributed to their extreme rarity as compared to surrounding blood cells[9,11]
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