Microdevices for dielectrophoretic flow-through cell separation

A novel dielectrophoretic cell-separation technique has been developed for the separation of white blood cells. A microdevice was constructed from two consecutive arrays of microelectrodes, one to focus the particles into a sheet and the second to separate them using a combination of positive and negative dielectrophoresis. At a flow rate of 1 ml/hour, experiments showed that THP-1 cells were captured on the electrode array. The experimental results were compared with a 2-D numerical simulation of the particle dynamics. The device is shown to be effective at fractionating subpopulations of cells into different bands along the array.