Abstract

Microfluidics Technologies for Cancer Diagnosis - From Cell Capture to Single Cell Analysis

Chwee Teck Lim, Provost’s Chair Professor, National University of Singapore

The presence of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) in bloodstream of patients is an important intermediate step in cancer metastasis and can provide valuable insights into disease detection and personalized treatment. As compared to obtaining a tissue biopsy which is invasive and painful, ‘‘liquid biopsy’’ for CTCs detection can be easily performed via a routine blood draw.  The presence and number of CTCs in peripheral blood has been associated with the severity of the disease and have potential uses for early detection, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment monitoring. However, the presence of the large number of blood cells complicates as well as makes detection of rare CTCs in blood of cancer patients extremely challenging. Here, we address these issues and demonstrate that physical biomarkers such as the unique size and deformability of CTCs can be effectively used for their detection and separation from blood via microfluidics.   We do this by leveraging on the many inherent advantages of microfluidics such as high sensitivity and spatial resolution, short processing time and low device cost. We developed a suite of microfluidic biochips that exploit the principles of cell size/deformability based separation as well as inertial focusing to perform high throughput continuous detection and separation of diseased cells.  These simple, efficient and cost effective microfluidic platforms will be invaluable in extracting viable CTCs for many downstream clinical applications including single cell analysis as well as personalized treatment.