Magnetic Levitation-Based Endothelial Cell Sorting

Cell sorting for rare cells is crucial for diagnostic purposes. Circulating Endothelial Cells (CECs) can be used as cardiovascular disease markers. Due to the rareness of the CECs in the blood, an accurate, easy, cost and time-effective sorting method is a need. Magnetic levitation is a promising technique for observing differences in the average height of endothelial and white blood cells which does not require any labeling. This study aims to show that the magnetic levitation principle can be used for sorting endothelial cells from the blood. By using paramagnetic medium concentrations of 10 mM and 50 mM, the average levitation height between HUVECs used as a model endothelial cells and U937 cells used as model of white blood cells was measured as 65 μm and 32 μm, respectively. Since there is a significant difference in levitation height for HUVECs and U937 cells, magnetic levitation technology exhibits promising potential for the precise sorting of endothelial cells.