A simple pyramid-shaped microchamber towards highly efficient isolation of circulating tumor cells from breast cancer patients

• Published in: Biomedical microdevices 2018-12, Vol.20 (4), p.83-83, Article 83
• Main Authors: Liu, Feng, Wang, Shuibing, Lu, Zhigang, Sun, Yumei, Yang, Chaogang, Zhou, Qiongwei, Hong, Shaoli, Wang, Shengxiang, Xiong, Bin, Liu, Kan, Zhang, Nangang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biological and Medical Physics; Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering; Biophysics; Blood; Breast cancer; Cancer; Engineering; Engineering Fluid Dynamics; Feasibility studies; Flow velocity; Microfluidics; Monitoring; Nanotechnology; Optimization; Patients; Statistical analysis; Statistical methods; Tumor cell lines; Tumor cells; Tumors
• ISSN: 1387-2176; 1572-8781
• DOI: 10.1007/s10544-018-0326-0

Isolation and detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has showed a great clinical impact for tumor diagnosis and treatment monitoring. Despite significant progresses of the existing technologies, feasible and cost-effective CTC isolation techniques are more desirable. In this study, a novel method was developed for highly efficient isolation of CTCs from breast cancer patients based on biophysical properties using a pyramid-shaped microchamber. Through optimization tests, the outlet height of 6 μm and the flow rate of 200 μL/min were chosen as the optimal conditions. The capture efficiencies of more than 85% were achieved for cancer cell lines (SKBR3, BGC823, PC3, and H1975) spiked in DMEM and healthy blood samples without clogging issue. In clinic assay, the platform identified CTCs in 13 of 20 breast cancer patients (65%) with an average of 4.25 ± 4.96 CTCs/2 mL, whereas only one cell was recognized as CTC in 1 of 15 healthy blood samples. The statistical analyses results demonstrated that both CTC positive rate and CTC counts were positive correlated with TNM stage ( p