Development of a microfluidic platform for size-based hydrodynamic enrichment and PSMA-targeted immunomagnetic isolation of circulating tumour cells in prostate cancer

Efforts to further improve the clinical management of prostate cancer (PCa) are hindered by delays in diagnosis of tumours and treatment deficiencies, as well as inaccurate prognoses that lead to unnecessary or inefficient treatments. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) may address these issues and could facilitate the selection of effective treatment courses and the discovery of new therapeutic targets. Therefore, there is much interest in isolation of elusive CTCs from blood. We introduce a microfluidic platform composed of a multiorifice flow fractionation (MOFF) filter cascaded to an integrated microfluidic magnetic (IMM) chip. The MOFF filter is primarily employed to enrich immunomagnetically labeled blood samples by size-based hydrodynamic removal of free magnetic beads that must originally be added to samples at disproportionately high concentrations to ensure the efficient immunomagnetic labeling of target cancer cells. The IMM chip is then utilized to capture prostate-specific membrane antigen-immunomagnetically labeled cancer cells from enriched samples. Our preclinical studies showed that the proposed method can selectively capture up to 75% of blood-borne PCa cells at clinically-relevant low concentrations (as low as 5 cells/ml), with the IMM chip showing up to 100% magnetic capture capability. Published under license by AIP Publishing.