Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
Biomedical Engineering Research Center, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
Electrophoresis. 2022 Jun;43(12):1347-1356. doi: 10.1002/elps.202100271. Epub 2022 Apr 26.
Malaria is a serious disease caused by Plasmodium parasites that infect red blood cells (RBCs). This paper presents the continuous separation of malaria-infected RBCs (iRBCs) from normal blood cells. The proposed method employed the discrete dielectrophoresis (DEP) in a microfluidic device with interdigitated electrodes. Our aim is to treat a sample having high concentration of cells to realize high throughput and to prevent the clogging of the microchannel with the use of the discrete DEP. The discrete DEP force for deflecting cells in the device was controlled by adjusting the magnitude, frequency, and duty cycle of the applied voltage. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated by separating the malaria-infected cells in samples having a cell concentration of 10 cells/µl. From experimental results, we determined the enrichment that is needed to enhance the detection in the case of low parasitemia. The enrichment of the infected cells at the device output was 3000 times as high as that of the input containing 1 infected cell to 10 normal cells. Therefore, the proposed method is highly effective and can significantly facilitate the detection of the infected cells for the identification of Malaria patients.
疟疾是由疟原虫感染红细胞（RBC）引起的严重疾病。本文提出了一种从正常血细胞中连续分离疟原虫感染的 RBC（iRBC）的方法。该方法在具有叉指电极的微流控装置中采用离散介电泳（DEP）。我们的目的是处理具有高细胞浓度的样品，以实现高通量，并通过使用离散 DEP 防止微通道堵塞。通过调整施加电压的幅度、频率和占空比来控制用于在设备中偏转细胞的离散 DEP 力。通过分离细胞浓度为 10 个细胞/µl 的样品中的疟原虫感染细胞，证明了该方法的有效性。从实验结果中，我们确定了在低疟原虫血症情况下需要增强检测所需的富集。与输入含有 1 个感染细胞和 10 个正常细胞的输入相比，在设备输出处感染细胞的富集度高 3000 倍。因此，该方法非常有效，可以显著促进感染细胞的检测，以识别疟疾患者。
