Combination of antibody-coated, physical-based microfluidic chip with wave-shaped arrays for isolating circulating tumor cells.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are found in the peripheral blood of patients with metastatic cancers, which have critical significance in cancer prognosis and diagnostics. Enumeration is significantly valuable since number of CTCs is strongly correlated to severity of disease. This article is proposed and demonstrated an antibody-coated, size-based microfluidic chip with wave-shaped arrays could efficiently capture CTCs combining two separation methods of both size- and deformability-based and affinity-based segregation. Utilizing immunocapture of capture chemistry of Epithelial Cell Adhension Molecule (EpCAM), tumor cells could be captured by narrow gaps or have a friction with microposts edges to realize both immune-affinity and size capture. This wave-shaped layout of microfluidic chip with varying gaps between adjacent circular microposts can generate perpendicular velocities to the fluidic direction. This oriented fluidic direction will carry cells to next smaller neighboring gap and then be captured gradually. The experiment results indicate capture efficiency is ~90% and viability is ~95% after extracted and cultured 3 days. Furthermore, this chip has been validated for whole blood with cancer cell lines and mimic patient blood. This study demonstrates feasibility using our microfluidic chip for CTCs research, monitoring cancer progress and evaluating therapeutic treatment.