Design and numerical study on a microfluidic system for circulating tumor cells separation from whole blood using magnetophoresis and dielectrophoresis techniques

The detection and separation of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the whole blood play an important role in early cancer diagnosis and metastasis. Recently, microfluidic technologies have been extensively investigated and emerged as potential alternative to conventional cell isolation technologies. In this study, we propose a microchannel of ferromagnetic tracks with added-electrodes cell separation (FTACS) structure coupled with the hydrodynamic focusing effect inside the microchannel. Magnetophoresis and dielectrophoresis caused by FTACS structure are integrated with the flow to manipulate cell trajectory. A numerical simulation is conducted to investigate the separation ability of our proposed design. The numerical analysis shows that our device has successfully separated four cell lines, including circulating tumor cells (CTCs), red blood cells (RBCs), white blood cells (WBCs), and platelets (PLTs), in a single separation step. Besides, the effects of several physical parameters on the cell trajectory are considered. The simulation results show that the highest separation efficiencies of our microfluidic chip obtain 93.33%, 95%, 91%, and 87% for CTCs, WBCs, PLTs, and RBCs, respectively with the CTCs purity of 100%. Our research provides a novel CTCs separation structure from the whole blood with the advantages of superior sensitivity, low cost, portability, small sample volume, and reduction in sample processing steps. It holds a great potential in biological applications such as cell dynamics, drug screening, toxicological screening.

Automated summary

In this study, a microfluidic technology is proposed for the detection and separation of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the whole blood. The technology offers advantages of high efficiency, low cost, portability, and reduction in sample processing steps.