Low‐cost polymer‐film spiral inertial microfluidic device for label‐free separation of malignant tumor cells

Abstract

We developed a low-cost polymer-film spiral inertial microfluidic device for the effective size-dependent separation of malignant tumor cells. The device was fabricated in polymer films by rapid laser cutting and chemical bonding. After fabricating the prototype device, the separation performance of our device was evaluated using particles and cells. The effects of operational flow rate, cell diameter, and cell concentration on the separation performance were explored. Our device successfully separated tumor cells from polydisperse white blood cells according to their different migration modes and lateral positions. Then, the separation of rare cells was carried out using the high-concentration lysed blood spiked with 200 tumor cells. Experimental results showed that 83.90% of the tumor cells could be recovered, while 99.87% of white blood cells could be removed. We successfully employed our device for processing clinical pleural effusion samples from patients with advanced metastatic breast cancer. Malignant tumor cells with an average purity of 2.37% could be effectively enriched, improving downstream diagnostic accuracy. Our device offers the advantages of label-free operation, low cost, and fast fabrication, thus being a potential tool for effective cell separation.

Cascaded elasto-inertial separation of malignant tumor cells from untreated malignant pleural and peritoneal effusions

“…The most attention has been paid to inertial microfluidics because the cell separation can be achieved via inertial lift force 32 and Dean drag force 33 over a wide range of Reynolds numbers (1-100). However, the previous inertial microfluidics [34][35][36] for MTC separation found it difficult to handle samples with high cell concentrations. To ensure separation performance, lysis pretreatment of red blood cells (RBCs) was required (see Table S1 †), which complicated the operation.…”