Design and Fabrication of a Novel Microfluidic System for Enrichment of Circulating Tumor Cells with the Assistance of Computer Simulations

Cancer is the first cause of death in developed countries. The heterogeneous nature of cancer requires patient-specified treatment plans. One reliable approach is collecting Circulating Tumour Cells (CTCs) and using them for prognosis and drug response assessment purposes. CTCs are rare and their separation from normal cell requires high-accuracy methods.

A microfluidic cell capture device to separate CTCs from peripheral blood is presented in this study. The CTC separation device applies hydrodynamic forces to categorize cells according to their sizes. The proposed device is designed and evaluated by numerical simulations and validated experimentally. The simulation modified design was fabricated by soft lithography which allows prototyping the device in a few hours. For experimental setup two solutions: 1) fixed cells spiked in Phosphate Buffered Saline (PBS), and 2) fixed cells in blood were used. The CTC separation device was validated by tracking the flow and separation of cancer cell lines in the solutions.

It is demonstrated that the setup is capable of CTC enrichment up to 50 times.

The presented CTC enrichment method reduces costs by eliminating the use of antibodies. The high-throughput method has the potential to be used in preclinical studies of cancer.