Effect of reservoir geometry on vortex trapping of cancer cells

Vortex-aided particle separation is a powerful method to efficiently isolate circulating tumor cells from blood, since it allows high throughput and continuous sample separation, with no need for time-consuming sample preprocessing. With this approach, only the larger particles from a heterogeneous...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Microfluidics and nanofluidics 2017-06, Vol.21 (6), p.1, Article 104
Main Authors: Paiè, P., Che, J., Di Carlo, D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analytical Chemistry
Atoms & subatomic particles
Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering
Blood
Blood circulation
Cancer
Cells
Consolidation
Design optimization
Dilution
Efficiency
Engineering
Engineering Fluid Dynamics
Enrichment
Fluid flow
Interactions
Methods
Nanotechnology and Microengineering
Neoplasms
Particle interactions
Particle sorting
Preprocessing
Research Paper
Separation
Simulation
Target cells
Trapping
Vortices
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Summary:Vortex-aided particle separation is a powerful method to efficiently isolate circulating tumor cells from blood, since it allows high throughput and continuous sample separation, with no need for time-consuming sample preprocessing. With this approach, only the larger particles from a heterogeneous sample will be stably trapped in reservoirs that expand from a straight microfluidic channel, allowing for efficient particle sorting along with simultaneous concentration. A possible limitation is related to the loss of particles from vortex traps due to particle–particle interactions that limit the final cellularity of the enriched solution. It is fundamental to minimize this issue considering that a scant number of target cells are diluted in highly cellular blood. In this work, we present a device for size-based particle separation, which exploits the well-consolidated vortex-aided sorting, but new reservoir layouts are presented and investigated in order to increase the trapping efficiency of the chip. Through simulations and experimental validations, we have been able to optimize the device design to increase the maximum number of particles that can be stably trapped in each reservoir and therefore the total efficiency of the chip.
ISSN:1613-4982
1613-4990
DOI:10.1007/s10404-017-1942-3