Flowing cells in a wavy microchannel for effective size-based cell sorting
SUTD
Currently cancer is becoming one of the leading causes of human death. One of the major difficulties towards achieving radical cure in cancer is due to malignant metastasis, which directly causes overwhelming obstacles in therapeutic management and early diagnosis. The ability to isolate rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs), the seeds for cancer metastasis, enables much less invasive approach for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. New microfluidic technologies for high throughput, high accuracy cell sorting of complex biological samples are highly sought after to address the challenge in rare cell isolation.
In this research, Dr Ai's team presented a novel inertial focusing and sorting device with a series of reverse wavy channel structures consisting of semi-circular sections that generate a periodically reversed hydrodynamic flow perpendicular to the main flow direction. The balance between two kinds of hydrodynamic forces resulted in a size-dependent lateral particle movement across the channel, which finally achieved size-based separation of target cells from non-target cells. The principal investigator, SUTD's Dr Ai said: "Compared to active methods, the passive inertial focusing with the use of hydrodynamic forces exhibit the merits of a simplified setup, high-throughput and low-energy consumption. Moreover, the linear array of these repeated wavy channel units also facilitates easy horizontal (2D) and vertical (3D) parallelization of multiple channels, which provides great potential for high-throughput cell sorting in practical biomedical applications." The team has applied the developed sorting technology for high-throughput isolation of cancer cells from whole blood samples.
Original publication
Yinning Zhou, Zhichao Ma & Ye Ai; "Sheathless inertial cell focusing and sorting with serial reverse wavy channel structures"; Microsystems & Nanoengineeringvolume; 2018
Other news from the department science
Most read news
More news from our other portals
See the theme worlds for related content
Topic world Diagnostics
Diagnostics is at the heart of modern medicine and forms a crucial interface between research and patient care in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. It not only enables early detection and monitoring of disease, but also plays a central role in individualized medicine by enabling targeted therapies based on an individual's genetic and molecular signature.
Topic world Diagnostics
Diagnostics is at the heart of modern medicine and forms a crucial interface between research and patient care in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. It not only enables early detection and monitoring of disease, but also plays a central role in individualized medicine by enabling targeted therapies based on an individual's genetic and molecular signature.