Scalable mesenchymal stem cell enrichment from bone marrow aspirate using deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) microfluidic sorting

The growing interest in regenerative medicine has opened new avenues for novel cell therapies using stem cells. Bone marrow aspirate (BMA) is an important source of stromal mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Conventional MSC harvesting from BMA relies on archaic centrifugation methods, often leading to poor yield due to osmotic stress, high centrifugation force, convoluted workflow, and long experimental time (& SIM;2-3 hours). To address these issues, we have developed a scalable microfluidic technology based on deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) for MSC isolation. This passive, label-free cell sorting method capitalizes on the morphological differences between MSCs and blood cells (platelets and RBCs) for effective separation using an inverted L-shaped pillar array. To improve throughput, we developed a novel multi-chip DLD system that can process 2.5 mL of raw BMA in 20 & PLUSMN; 5 minutes, achieving a 2-fold increase in MSC recovery compared to centrifugation methods. Taken together, we envision that the developed DLD platform will enable fast and efficient isolation of MSCs from BMA for effective downstream cell therapy in clinical settings. MSCs are enriched twice more efficiently with 10-fold shorten processing time from undiluted human bone marrow aspirate.

Automated summary

The growing interest in regenerative medicine has led to the development of a scalable microfluidic technology called deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) for efficient isolation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) from bone marrow aspirate. This passive, label-free cell sorting method utilizes morphological differences between MSCs and blood cells for effective separation. Compared to centrifugation methods, the multi-chip DLD system achieves a 2-fold increase in MSC recovery with a processing time of 20±5 minutes for 2.5 mL of raw bone marrow aspirate. This technology has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of downstream cell therapy in clinical settings.