Dendrimer-assisted hydrophilic magnetic nanoparticles as sensitive substrates for rapid recognition and enhanced isolation of target tumor cells

Capture and detection of targeted tumor cells provide a significant meaning in the early diagnosis and therapy of cancer. Nowadays, the development of advanced nanomaterials for cell capture is outstanding, however there still remain great challenges and extensible space. Herein we report a novel and cushy method to synthesize the epidermal growth factor receptor antibody (anti-EGFR) functionalized dendrimer-assisted hydrophilic magnetic nanoparticles as sensitive substrates, which possess excellent capability of rapid targeting and highly efficient capturing of tumor cells. The introduction of dendrimers immensely improves the hydrophilicity and modification sites of substrates, which not only accelerates the procedure of cell capture, but also improves the amount of antibodies conjugated with the magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs). Thus, the newly synthesized substrates not only cut down the recognition time but also realize highly selective capture of target tumor cells. Moreover, the characteristics of MNPs lead to the rapid contact between substrates and cells and quick separation from the reaction solution. As a result, the functional MNPs can capture 86% +/- 5% of tumor cells and isolate rare number of tumor cells from spiked whole blood samples in only 15 min without the damage of cell viability. These results suggest that our method is reliable and has great potential in the application of cell isolation. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.