Abstract

Chemistry-Free Microfluidic Technologies to Sort Cells for Health and Disease

Utkan Demirci, Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine

Micro- and nano-scale technologies can have a significant impact on medicine and biology in the areas of cell manipulation, diagnostics and monitoring. At the convergence of these new technologies and biology, we research for enabling solutions to the real world problems at the clinic. Emerging nano-scale and microfluidic technologies integrated with biology offer innovative possibilities for creating intelligent, mobile medical lab-chip devices that could transform diagnostics and monitoring, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. In this talk, first, we will present an overview of our laboratory's work in these areas focused on applications in magnetic levitation methods for assembling cells and chemistry free sorting of rare cells from whole blood. Cells consist of micro- and nano-scale components and materials that contribute to their fundamental magnetic and density signatures. Previous studies have claimed that magnetic levitation can only be used to measure density signatures of non-living materials. Here, we demonstrate that both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells can be levitated and that each cell has a unique levitation profile. Furthermore, our levitation platform uniquely enables ultrasensitive density measurements, imaging, and profiling of cells in real-time at single-cell resolution. This method has broad applications, such as the label-free identification and sorting of CTCs and CTM with broad applications in drug screening in personalized medicine. Second, we will present technologies to sort sperm cells for IVF and IUI applications using microfluidics without any labels or chemistry. I will also share some of the clinical implications of these technologies indicating the broad potential that chemistry-free and label-free microfluidic-based technologies have in medicine.