School of Mechanical Engineering, and Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Design and Manufacture of Micro-Nano Biomedical Instruments, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China.
School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Sydney, Darlington, New South Wales 2008, Australia.
Anal Chem. 2022 Jan 25;94(3):1859-1866. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.1c04819. Epub 2022 Jan 12.
Handheld sample preparation devices are urgently required for point-of-care diagnosis in resource-limited settings. In this paper, we develop a novel handheld sorter with a multifunction integrated microfluidic chip. The integrated microfluidic handheld sorter (μHCS) is composed of three units, including cartridges, shells, and core integrated microchip. The integrated microchip contains two flow regulators for achieving the on-chip regulation of the input flows generated by a low-cost diaphragm pump to the desired flow rates and a spiral inertial microfluidic channel for size-based cell separation. After introducing the conceptual design of our μHCS system, the performances of the separate spiral channel and flow regulator are systematically characterized and optimized, respectively. Finally, the prototype of the μHCS is successfully assembled to separate the malignant tumor cells from the clinical pleural effusions. Our μHCS is simple to use, inexpensive, portable, and compact and can be used for high-throughput label-free separation of rare cells from large volume samples in resource-limited areas.
在资源有限的环境中，即时诊断迫切需要手持式样品制备设备。本文开发了一种带有多功能集成微流控芯片的新型手持式分选器。集成式手持式微流控分选器（μHCS）由三个单元组成，包括盒式器件、外壳和核心集成微芯片。集成微芯片包含两个流量调节器，用于实现由低成本隔膜泵产生的输入流到所需流速的片上调节，以及用于基于大小的细胞分离的螺旋惯性微流道。在介绍我们的μHCS 系统的概念设计之后，分别对单独的螺旋通道和流量调节器的性能进行了系统的特征描述和优化。最后，成功地组装了μHCS 原型机以从临床胸腔积液中分离恶性肿瘤细胞。我们的μHCS 使用简单、价格低廉、便携且紧凑，可用于从资源有限地区的大容量样本中高通量分离稀有细胞，无需标记。
