Abstract

SACA Chip for Rapid Circulating Tumor Cells Diagnostics

Fan-Gang Tseng, Distinguished Professor, National Tsing-Hua University

Despite the recent advancement of biotechnology and pharmaceutical research, cancers remain the leading cause of human mortality. It is vital to diagnose cancers at an early stage when treatment can dramatically improve prognosis. So far, low-cost and easy to operate devices, which allow efficient isolation and sensitive detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) for routine blood screening, remain lacking. This talk will introduce a novel micro fluidic platform which can isolate CTCs from the real blood sample in 30 minutes: this system includes a high throughput blood cell separation chip which can separate white blood cells with CTCs from red blood cells and platelets by inertial and suction actions; a nano structured surface which can allow higher retention rate of CTCs on the surface for sample enrichment by 100 folds from 1/107 upto 1/105 CTCs/WBCs.;and the enriched sample will go through a final cells self-assembly process into a densed monolayer on a cell assembly chip for in parallel inspection at high speed. As a result, the CTCs can be identified in 30 minutes by the integration of these three chips altogether. Isolated CTCs will still be in vital and can be further characterized and cultivated for the identification of cancer stem cells for prognosis.