Abstract

Clinical Utility of Microfluidics based Lab-on-a-Chip Devices for Advanced Cancer Diagnostics and Treatment Monitoring

Shibichakravarthy Kannan, Founder & CEO, Theranosis Life Sciences Pvt Ltd

Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technology is the current trend towards the development of cost-efficient highly sensitive medical devices for various biomedical applications including point-of-care diagnostics especially in oncology where such devices have been developed to study the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the peripheral blood of cancer patients. Detection and enumeration of CTCs over the course of chemotherapy has significant potential to guide the clinician for a personalized medicine approach by assessing the tumor response immediately in real time as well as to plan the future treatment options if the current therapy fails. Since CTCs are found in extremely low counts (1 cell among a billion normal blood cells) there is a necessity to develop novel LOC technologies to isolate, enrich, detect and enumerate such rare cells. Capturing the CTCs using innovative microfluidics lab-on-a-chip devices is now a proven concept with many successful prototypes already in clinical trials. Now we have an opportunity to study the cancer metastasis before it even starts becoming one. Clusters of CTCs are aptly called micro-metastases as they have higher potential to become a secondary tumor in another niche organ. We want to present some of the challenges in understanding CTC biology and how lab-on-a-chip devices can be used effectively to accomplish this goal.