A Microfluidic Platform for Isolation and Detection of Circulating Tumor Cells

Sung Chi Tsai；Lien-Yu Hung；Wen-Hsin Chang；Chen-Yu Fu；Gwo-Bin Lee

Circulating tumor cells ； aptamer ； cell isolation ； microfluidic

微系統暨奈米科技協會會刊

36期（2016 / 11 / 10）

20 - 27

英文

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been described as cells that have been shed into the vasculature from a primary tumor and circulate in the bloodstream. In order to improve the CTCs recovery rate, we herein report a new integrated microfluidic system which is capable of performing red blood cells (RBCs) lysis, a negative selection process for depleting white blood cells (WBCs) and a positive selection process for specifically capturing target cancer cells by using cancer cell-specific aptamers. The entire process could be performed on a single chip automatically without any human intervention within a time spend of one hour. When compared with the traditional negative or positive selection approach, the new platform provides higher CTCs isolation efficiency which could be crucial for cancer diagnosis. Furthermore, the specificity of the aptamer may curb any ＂false positive＂ and promising results have been reported in this study.