Microfluidic Chip Based Innovative Approaches For The Enrichment Of Circulating Tumor Cells

Tumor metastasis is the primary cause of cancer death,and tumor cell diffusion through the circulatory system is the key to metastasis.These tumor cells entering the circulatory system are called circulating tumor cells(CTCs).Therefore,the detection of circulating tumor cells is of great significance for early screening and diagnosis of cancer,progress prediction,efficacy monitoring and prognosis evaluation of cancer.Compared with other methods,the detection of circulating tumor cells in peripheral blood can provide more direct and accurate tumor information with non-invasive operation and less false-positive rate.However,circulating tumor cells are very rare in peripheral blood,so it is urgent to develop new methods for CTCs detection with the advantages of high-efficiency separation and high sensitivity.Among the current methods and analysis platforms,microfluidic technology has the advantages of easy operation,high throughput,high speed and low sample consumption,and has a broad application prospect in circulating tumor cell isolation,subsequent cell culture,or downstream detection.In this paper,a microfluidic chip based on the principle of deterministic lateral displacement and molecular targeting recognition is developed to achieve high-efficiency capture and high sensitivity detection of CTCs in peripheral blood.First of all,we constructed a microfluidic chip based on antibody recognition,and applied it to the detection of clinical lung cancer.The positive rate was 79.17%.Secondly,in view of the shortcomings of the antibody recognition system,such as expensive and difficult to preserve,we also use folic acid instead of antibody as a targeted molecule to develop another new simple,economical and easy-to-preserve method for CTCs separation and detection.It was applied to the clinical detection of ovarian cancer,and the positive rate was 92.59%.The results show that the microfluidic chip based on antibody recognition has the advantages of high selectivity and high sensitivity,and can be used for efficient enrichment and detection of CTCs in peripheral blood.While the microfluidic chip based on folic acid targeting recognition has the advantages of simplicity,economy and easy storage,and it also has a broad application prospect in the separation and detection of CTCs.