Label-free ferrohydrodynamic cell separation of circulating tumor cells.

ABSTRACT: Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have significant implications in both basic cancer research and clinical applications. To address the limited availability of viable CTCs for fundamental and clinical investigations, effective separation of extremely rare CTCs from blood is critical. Ferrohydrodynamic cell separation (FCS), a label-free method that conducted cell sorting based on cell size difference in biocompatible ferrofluids, has thus far not been able to enrich low-concentration CTCs from cancer patients' blood because of technical challenges associated with processing clinical samples. In this study, we demonstrated the development of a laminar-flow microfluidic FCS device that was capable of enriching rare CTCs from patients' blood in a biocompatible manner with a high throughput (6 mL

SUBMITTER: Zhao W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5595667 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature