Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are the primary entities responsible for spawning cancer metastasis. Detection of CTCs provides an indicator for the clinical diagnosis and prognosis of various types of cancers. Several approaches, based primarily on flowing the sample through antibody-coated magnetic beads or microchip surfaces, have been described for isolating and counting CTCs. However, these approaches require extensive sample preparation and/or complex surface microstructures to detect the extremely low abundance of CTCs in blood. In this study we describe an immuno-micromachine-based approach for in vitro isolation of cancer cells that holds promise for direct CTC detection without sample preprocessing.
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