Design and Modeling of a Microfluidic Device with Potential Application for Isolation of Circulating Tumor Cells

Currently, cancer is a worldwide health problem causing around 8.8 million deaths in 2015. An approach to reduce the number of losses caused by cancer is the early detection and personalized treatment for each patient. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are derived from primary tumor tissues and transferred to other organs of the human body. The microfluidic devices have potential application to isolate CTCs from a blood sample using cell physical properties. In this paper, we present the design and modeling of a microfluidic device for separation of microparticles with sizes similar to CTCs in a continuous flow using computational fluid dynamic (CFD). The microfluidic device has two spiral microchannels with rectangular cross-sections (50μm height and 200 μm width). The device design has two isolation phases, in which the first phase is used to isolate particles larger than 18 μm. In the second phase, the hydrodynamic condition is modified by a mass-flow inlet to reach a high throughput isolation for the remain particles (4 and 12 μm diameter). The isolation percentages were 100 % for the microparticles of 25 μm, 18 μm and 12 μm, respectively. On the other hand, the isolation percentage of the microparticles of 4 μm achieved the 95 %.