A modular microfluidic system for cell pre-concentration and genetic sample preparation

A modular system containing mixers, incubation unit, and cell capture unit has been developed using polymer microfluidic chips. A custom interfacing scheme has been used to assemble individual chips into the functional system. This system has been used to perform cell pre-concentration from a complex sample matrix allowing for carrying out assays on rare cell targets appearing in low concentrations in the analyzed sample. We demonstrate that 2 ml of the sample can be processed in a cell capture modular system with cell capture efficiency of 53 and 37% for PBS- and blood-based samples, respectively. We also show that these capture rates are strongly dependent on the effectiveness of pre-capture mixing between the cell containing sample and bead-antibody complexes.