A Novel Microfluidic Disk Enabling Multi-sample Isolation of Rare Cells from Peripheral Blood

Rare cells in blood possess much clinical significance for diagnosis. One type of rare cells is circulating tumor cells which has been demonstrated to have prognosis value in metastatic breast, prostate and colorectal cancer patients. Hence, these cells have the potential to detect and monitor metastatic events. However, population of CTCs is extremely rare compared to other peripheral blood cells causing great difficulty in their detection and isolation. This thesis presents a microfluidic disk platform for multi-throughput enrichment of rare cells. This platform automates several sequential process: density separation, enrichment of rare cells and immunofluorescence staining with multiple blood samples simultaneously. About 100 tumor cells (MCF-7) were labeled by epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM) and spiked into multiple blood samples to interrogate the protocol. Results show the multi-sample disk can detect over 80% of spiked cells from multiple blood samples regardless of MCF-7 EpCAM expression levels. Moreover, the multi-sample disk enables different immunofluorescence staining process for the target cells collected in different collecting reservoirs. The disk should be amenable for multi-sample processing of CTC with high recovery rate.