Microfluidic Label-Free Isolation and Enumeration of Circulating Tumor Cells from Blood Samples

摘要

Current tumor tissue biopsies are invasive procedures that can be limited by small sample size and difficulty accessing the tumor site, while also missing intra-tumor heterogeneity. These limitations can be overcome with a liquid biopsy, i.e. non-invasive blood tests that aim to isolate and analyze circulating tumor cells (CTCs), cell-free DNA and/or exosomes continuously shed into the bloodstream by both primary and metastatic lesions[1]. Vortex Biosciences has developed VTX-1, a fast and label-free microfluidic platform to isolate intact CTCs from whole blood in less than 1.5 hours using inertial microfluidics and microscale vortices[2,3].