Jidong Wang, Wenjing Lu, Chuanhao Tang, Yi Liu, Jiashu Sun, Xuan Mu, Lin Zhang, Bo Dai, Xiaoyan Li, Hailong Zhuo, Xingyu Jiang

We develop an inertial-based microfluidic cell sorter combined with an integrated membrane filter, allowing for size-based, label-free and high-efficient separation and enrichment of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in whole blood. The cell sorter is composed of a double spiral microchannel that hydrodynamically focuses and separates large CTCs from small blood cells. The focused CTCs with the equilibrium position around the midline of microchannel are further captured and enriched by a membrane filter (pore size of 8 μm) attached at the middle outlet. This integrated microfluidic device can process 1 mL of whole blood containing spiked tumor cells (A549, human lung adenocarcinoma epithelial cell line) within 15 min, with the capture efficiency of 74.4 % at the concentration as low as tens of A549 cells per mL whole blood. This microfluidic cell sorter is further adopted for isolation of CTCs from peripheral blood samples of patients with metastatic lung cancer. The immunostaining and CK-19 mRNA detection are applied for identification of captured CTCs, showing that our method can detect 90 % of metastatic lung cancer patients before therapy, whereas the commercially used system can only detect 40 % of the same patients. We also use the expression of CK-19 mRNA from captured CTCs as an indicator for monitoring the therapeutic efficiency, which correlates well with x-ray computed tomography (CT) assessment of the disease.