Circulating tumor cells (CTCs), shed from primary and metastatic tumors into the bloodstream, offer a minimally invasive approach to tumor biology, enabling early diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring. However, their clinical application remains limited by technical challenges in rare cell isolation. Here, the study presents a microfluidic device that integrates deterministic lateral displacement (DLD), inertial focusing, and immunomagnetic separation for efficient and gentle CTC isolation from whole blood. The device achieves multi-stage sorting, where the DLD array removes small blood components, inertial focusing aligns remaining cells into predictable streamlines, and magnetic deflection captures target cells labeled with EpCAM magnetic beads. To evaluate device performance, a model sample containing only pancreatic cancer cells (PANC-1) was used. The microfluidic device demonstrated a separation efficiency of approximately 71.3% for magnetically labeled cells, with minimal recovery of unlabeled cells, confirming the device’s specificity and effectiveness. This label-dependent but physically enhanced approach enables high-throughput and selective isolation of rare cancer cells, offering strong potential for downstream analyses and cancer diagnostics.
Qiu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.