Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Lab Chip. 2013 Feb 21;13(4):602-9. doi: 10.1039/c2lc90148j.
Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are important targets for study as we strive to better understand, diagnose, and treat cancers. However, CTCs are found in blood at extremely low concentrations; this makes isolation, enrichment, and characterization of CTCs technically challenging. Recently, the development of CTC separation devices has grown rapidly in both academia and industry. Part of this development effort centered on microfluidic platforms, exploiting the advantages of microfluidics to improve CTC separation performance and device integration. In this Focus article, we highlight some of the recent work in microfluidic CTC separation and detection systems and discuss our appraisal of what the field should do next.
循环肿瘤细胞（CTCs）是我们努力更好地理解、诊断和治疗癌症的重要研究目标。然而，CTCs 在血液中的浓度极低；这使得 CTC 的分离、富集和特征鉴定在技术上具有挑战性。最近，CTC 分离设备的发展在学术界和工业界都迅速增长。这方面的发展工作部分集中在微流控平台上，利用微流控的优势来提高 CTC 分离性能和器件集成度。在这篇专题文章中，我们重点介绍了微流控 CTC 分离和检测系统的一些最新工作，并讨论了我们对该领域下一步工作的看法。
