Institute of Nanotechnology (INT) and Karlsruhe Nano Micro Facility (KNMF), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany.
Department of Tumor Biology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, 20246, Hamburg, Germany.
Adv Biosyst. 2020 Feb;4(2):e1900162. doi: 10.1002/adbi.201900162. Epub 2019 Dec 23.
The capture of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is still a challenging application for microfluidic chips, as these cells are rare and hidden in a huge background of blood cells. Here, different microfluidic ceiling designs in regard to their capture efficiency for CTCs in model experiments and more realistic conditions of blood samples spiked with a clinically relevant amount of tumor cells are evaluated. An optimized design for the capture platform that allows highly efficient recovery of CTCs from size-based pre-enriched samples under realistic conditions is obtained. Furthermore, the viability of captured tumor cells as well as single cell recovery for downstream genomic analysis is demonstrated. Additionally, the authors' findings underline the importance of evaluating rational design rules for microfluidic devices based on theoretical models by application-specific experiments.
微流控芯片仍然难以捕获循环肿瘤细胞（CTCs），因为这些细胞非常罕见，且隐藏在大量血细胞背景中。在此，研究人员评估了不同微流控天花板设计在模型实验和用临床相关量肿瘤细胞增菌的血样更实际条件下对 CTC 的捕获效率。得到了一种用于捕获平台的优化设计，该设计可在实际条件下，从基于大小预富集的样品中高度有效地回收 CTC。此外，还证明了捕获的肿瘤细胞的活力以及用于下游基因组分析的单细胞回收。此外，作者的研究结果强调了根据特定于应用的实验，通过理论模型评估微流控器件的合理设计规则的重要性。
