Cell Mechanics Based Microfluidic Platforms for Liquid Biopsy and Personalized Medicine

There are approximately 5 billion cells in one milliliter of blood with red blood cells (RBCs) accounting for >99% of the cellular components. Besides blood constituents, diseased cells such circulating tumor cells (CTCs) can also be present in peripheral blood arising from metastasis.  In fact, this is of clinical significance as their presence in blood can present possible routes for cancer detection, diagnosis and even therapy. However, the large number of RBCs complicates cancer diagnosis as it makes detection of these rare CTCs in blood extremely challenging. Here, we address these issues and demonstrate that cell mechanics related biomarkers such as cell size and deformability can be effectively used for cancer cell detection and isolation from blood using microfluidics. We do this by leveraging on its many inherent advantages such as high sensitivity, small sample volume, short processing time and low cost. We develop a suite of microfluidic biochips that not only allows for the retrieval of CTCs from peripheral blood of patients via a routine blood draw (aka liquid biopsy), but also enables the selection of individual specific CTCs for downstream single cell analysis.  These simple, efficient and cost effective microfluidic platforms will be imperative in realizing effective diagnostics through the enrichment of clinical samples for subsequent downstream single cell analysis, molecular analysis and genetic sequencing for detection of druggable mutation for personalized treatment.