Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) that break off from the primary tumor are an excellent source of information about the state of a patient’s cancer and how it’s reacting to specific therapies. Yet, because CTCs are extremely rare and are difficult to separate from other cells, they haven’t been used in widespread clinical practice. Now researchers from Penn State, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon University have reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on a new device that can rapidly and gently separate CTCs from cancer patients’ blood samples.
The microfluidic device has a primary channel through which a blood sample is pumped through. On the sides outside of the channel are two acoustic transducers that create finely tuned standing sound waves in the sample as it passes by. The channel itself has a sloping shape that works with the tilted-angle sound waves to help CTCs move toward one edge while letting all the other cells trend toward the other edge. This allows the cells to separate quickly and without any significant disturbance to their vitality, allowing them to be used in the pathology lab to analyze the existing cancer.
Here’s a video filmed through a microscope showing the separation of CTCs from normal cells within the device:
Study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Acoustic separation of circulating tumor cells…
Source: Penn State…