Microfluidic, marker-free isolation of circulating tumor cells from blood samples

By N. M. Karabacak, P. Spuhler, F. Fachin, Eugene J. Lim, Vincent Pai, E. Ozkumur, Joseph M. Martel, N. Kojic, Kyle C. Smith, Pin-i Chen and 10 more. Nature Protocols, 2014

715 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ability to isolate and analyze rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has the potential to further our understanding of cancer metastasis and enhance the care of cancer patients. In this protocol, we describe the procedure for isolating rare CTCs from blood samples by using tumor antigen–independent microfluidic CTC-iChip technology. The CTC-iChip uses deterministic lateral displacement, inertial focusing and magnetophoresis to sort up to 107 cells/s. By using two-stage magnetophoresis and depletion antibodies against leukocytes, we achieve 3.8-log depletion of white blood cells and a 97% yield of rare cells with a sample processing rate of 8 ml of whole blood/h. The CTC-iChip is compatible with standard cytopathological and RNA-based characterization methods. This protocol describes device production, assembly, blood sample preparation, system setup and the CTC isolation process. Sorting 8 ml of blood sample requires 2 h including setup time, and chip production requires 2–5 d.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ed5b01d310897b330a5d3d8e56ae563bcd16407

Citations in the corpus

• Single-cell RNA-seq: advances and future challenges (2014, neutral): “There is great hope that RNA-seq of CTCs will aid the identification of a tumor’s origin, improving the treatment of patients.”