Engineering microfluidic chip for circulating tumor cells: From enrichment, release to single cell analysis

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) contain relatively complete clinical information of the original tumors that could be used for cancer diagnosis, therapy monitoring and drug resistance evaluation. The microfluidic chip is a promising tool for the low abundance of CTC enrichment, controllable release and downstream analysis. It will help to unlock the innate powers of the CTCs for establishment of biological and clinical insights. In this review, we review the recent progress for the CTC detection and provided in-depth insights into CTC research, including in various CTC enrichments, the controllable release of bulk and single CTC and a wide range of the downstream analysis from the genomics, proteomics to single cell sequencing with engineering microfluidic chips. The development trends and promising research directions in the future are also discussed. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.