Microfluidic enrichment for the single cell analysis of circulating tumor cells

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2016 papers

Abstract

Resistance to drug therapy is a major concern in cancer treatment. To probe clones resistant to chemotherapy, the current approach is to conduct pooled cell analysis. However, this can yield false negative outcomes, especially when we are analyzing a rare number of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) among an abundance of other cell types. Here, we develop a microfluidic device that is able to perform high throughput, selective picking and isolation of single CTC to 100% purity from a larger population of other cells. This microfluidic device can effectively separate the very rare CTCs from blood samples from as few as 1 in 20,000 white blood cells. We first demonstrate isolation of pure tumor cells from a mixed population and track variations of acquired T790M mutations before and after drug treatment using a model PC9 cell line. With clinical CTC samples, we then show that the isolated single CTCs are representative of dominant EGFR mutations such as T790M and L858R found in the primary tumor. With this single cell recovery device, we can potentially implement personalized treatment not only through detecting genetic aberrations at the single cell level, but also through tracking such changes during an anticancer therapy.

Related Papers

• → Droplet Microfluidics—A Tool for Single‐Cell Analysis(2012)535 cited
• → 3D Droplet-Based Microfluidic Device Easily Assembled from Commercially Available Modules Online Coupled with ICPMS for Determination of Silver in Single Cell(2019)42 cited
• → Get to Understand More from Single-Cells: Current Studies of Microfluidic-Based Techniques for Single-Cell Analysis(2015)34 cited
• → Establishment of a cascaded microfluidic single cell analysis system for molecular and functional heterogeneity analysis of circulating tumor cells(2023)7 cited
• → Droplet-Based Microfluidics for Single-Cell Encapsulation and Analysis(2019)7 cited