| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 奈米工程與微系統研究所 === 100 === Presently, viable tumour-derived epithelial cells (circulating tumour cells or CTCs) have been identified in peripheral blood from cancer patients and are probably the origin of intractable metastatic disease. And the cells are extremely rare, tumor cells represent a potential alternative to invasive biopsies as a source of tumour tissue for the detection, characterization and monitoring of non-hematologic cancers. The ability to identify, isolate, propagate and molecularly characterize cancer cell subpopulations could further the discovery of cancer stem cell biomarkers and expand the understanding of the biology of metastasis. But the current strategies for isolating CTCs are limited to complex analytic approaches that generate very low yield and purity.
In this work, we design a microfluidic chip based on inertial hydrodynamic force to help on the separation of CTC cells from normal cells. This in vitro cells separation device provides simple control, cheap and high throughput way to enrich CTCs based on the interaction of two majors hydrodynamics forces in flow. One is the wall repulsion force due to the steric crowding effect between the particle and the wall, and another is the inertial lift force that originates from the shear-gradient of the flow. The wall repulsion force pushes the particle away from the wall and the inertial lift force draws the particle toward the wall. Hence, the balance between these two oppositely directed forces induces an equilibrium position at a certain equilibrium position. The wall repulsion force pushes the particle away from the wall and the inertial lift force draws the particle toward the wall along the combination of several circulating straight, curve channel and suction flow of CTCs in huge number of whole blood cells.
In the preliminary section we successful demonstrated the separation efficiency of erythrocytes (red blood cells) up to 95% means about 3.31 billion of ~5billion cells in milliliters has been sucked out into waste chamber and keeping the peripheral blood leukocytes (white blood cells) or circulating tumor cells in main channel with most of it are stacked at separation entrance or collection chamber. This current result extremely fast separation just less than 50 minutes and high enrichment device that have a great potential to replace recent clinical or biology cells detection and development technique such as, centrifugation with lysis buffer, electrophoresis separation chip, or even flow cytometer.
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