Enrichment of circulating tumor cells in tumor-bearing mouse blood by a deterministic lateral displacement microfluidic device

Concentration of real tumor cells leaking into blood from cancer was attempted by a deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) microfluidic device. Spiked cultured cell line tumor cells are often used to verify performance of the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) separation methods. Cultured tumor cells are obviously larger than most of hematocytes and considered not to be appropriate as CTC mimics, while there is uncertainty in identifying real CTCs from clinical samples and there is no practical way to examine CTCs leakage into benign cells during the sorting. In this work, blood samples were prepared from tumor-bearing mice whose tumors were induced by implanting cells with GFP expression to living mice. Therefore, CTCs were identified by their fluorescence emission. We succeeded in the enrichment of tumor cells to 0.05% from the blood, in which CTCs were negligibly detected among three million blood cells, and little loss of CTCs was observed.