Cheng Yinuo, Ye Xiongying, Ma Zengshuai, Xie Shuai, Wang Wenhui
State Key Laboratory of Precision Measurement Technology and Instruments, Department of Precision Instruments, Tsinghua University , Beijing, China.
Biomicrofluidics. 2016 Feb 12;10(1):014118. doi: 10.1063/1.4941985. eCollection 2016 Jan.
Rapid separation of white blood cells from whole blood sample is often required for their subsequent analyses of functions and phenotypes, and many advances have been made in this field. However, most current microfiltration-based cell separation microfluidic chips still suffer from low-throughput and membrane clogging. This paper reports on a high-throughput and clogging-free microfluidic filtration platform, which features with an integrated bidirectional micropump and commercially available polycarbonate microporous membranes. The integrated bidirectional micropump enables the fluid to flush micropores back and forth, effectively avoiding membrane clogging. The microporous membrane allows red blood cells passing through high-density pores in a cross-flow mixed with dead-end filtration mode. All the separation processes, including blood and buffer loading, separation, and sample collection, are automatically controlled for easy operation and high throughput. Both microbead mixture and undiluted whole blood sample are separated by the platform effectively. In particular, for white blood cell separation, the chip recovered 72.1% white blood cells with an over 232-fold enrichment ratio at a throughput as high as 37.5 μl/min. This high-throughput, clogging-free, and highly integrated platform holds great promise for point-of-care blood pretreatment, analysis, and diagnosis applications.
为了后续对白细胞的功能和表型进行分析，通常需要从全血样本中快速分离白细胞，并且该领域已经取得了许多进展。然而，目前大多数基于微滤的细胞分离微流控芯片仍然存在通量低和膜堵塞的问题。本文报道了一种高通量且无堵塞的微流控过滤平台，其特点是集成了双向微泵和市售的聚碳酸酯微孔膜。集成的双向微泵使流体能够来回冲洗微孔，有效避免膜堵塞。微孔膜允许红细胞以错流混合死端过滤模式通过高密度孔。所有分离过程，包括血液和缓冲液加载、分离和样品收集，均自动控制，操作简便且通量高。该平台能有效分离微珠混合物和未稀释的全血样本。特别是对于白细胞分离，该芯片在高达37.5 μl/min的通量下，回收了72.1%的白细胞，富集率超过232倍。这种高通量、无堵塞且高度集成的平台在即时护理血液预处理、分析和诊断应用方面具有巨大潜力。
