Towards single-cell genome analysis of circulating tumor cells based on microcavity array

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are defined as tumor cells circulating in the peripheral blood of patients with metastatic cancer. CTCs are well recognized as accessible and valuable biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and are a potential target for drug discovery. However, the recovery of such extremely rare CTCs from the peripheral blood, which contains a mixture of CTCs and a large number of hematologic cells, presents a technical challenge. In this study, techniques for the recovery of CTCs based on the microcavity array (MCA) are introduced. The MCA can specifically obtain tumor cells from whole blood based on differences in the size and deformability between tumor cells and hematologic cells. By controlling the size and shape of the cavity, efficient CTC recovery was achieved in our study. Furthermore, an automated CTC recovery system using a MCA was developed for subsequent high-throughput analysis. The MCA system was finally applied to single-cell genome analysis, and accurate single-cell manipulation and genome amplification without any contamination of neighboring cells and without loss of target cells was achieved.