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. 2023 Sep 13:1706:464249.
doi: 10.1016/j.chroma.2023.464249. Epub 2023 Jul 29.

An experimental study of centrifugal microfluidic platforms for magnetic-inertial separation of circulating tumor cells using contraction-expansion and zigzag arrays

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An experimental study of centrifugal microfluidic platforms for magnetic-inertial separation of circulating tumor cells using contraction-expansion and zigzag arrays

Maede Momeni et al. J Chromatogr A. .

Abstract

Cancer diagnosis has recently been at the forefront of recent medical research, with ongoing efforts to develop devices and technologies for detecting cancer in patients. One promising approach for cancer diagnosis is the detection of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) in blood samples. Separating these rare cells from the diverse background of blood cells and analyzing them can provide valuable insights into the disease's stage and lethality. Here we present the design and fabrication of a centrifugal microfluidic platform on a polymeric disk that utilizes centrifugal forces for cell isolation. The separation units exploit both active and passive methods. In other words, in addition to introducing novel geometry for channels, an external magnetic field is also employed to separate the _target cells from the background cells. In order for the external field to function, the CTCs must first be labeled with antibody-conjugated nanoparticles; the separation process should be then performed. Before the experimental tests, a numerical study was done to determine the optimum parameters; the angular velocity and magnetization investigations showed that 2000 rpm and 868,000 (kA/m) are the optimum conditions for the designed device to reach the efficiency of 100% for both White Blood Cells (WBCs) and CTCs. These results indicate that the passive region of the channels primarily contributes to the focusing of the _target cells, and showed that the focusing effect is more pronounced in the expansion-contraction geometry compared to the zigzag geometry. Additionally, the results proved that curved channel geometries performed better than straight ones in terms of separation efficiency. However, if the separation relies solely on channel geometry, the majority of cells would be directed towards the non-_target chamber, leading to suboptimal results. This is due to the direction of the forces acting on the cells. However, including an external magnetic field improves the direction of the net force and enhances the separation efficiency. Finally, the numerical and experimental results of the study were compared, and the curved expansion-contraction channel is introduced as the best geometry having 100% and ∼92% CTC separation efficiency, respectively.

Keywords: Hybrid method; Inertial separation; Integrated microfluidics; LOD; Magnetophoresis; Secondary flow.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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