Rare Circulating Tumor Cells Isolation Via Spiral-Deformed Microfluidic Chip

This paper presents a novel spiral-deformed inertial microfluidic system to capture circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the whole blood with high recovery rate and purity. In this chip, a 5-loop spiral channel and multiple expansion structures were designed to improve the separation performance of the spiral microfluidics based on theoretical modeling and simulations. Experiment results showed that the CTCs’ recovery rate is over 90% and the purity can reach about 35%, much higher than conventional spiral microfluidics. This chip has potential to serve as a platform for cancer diagnostics analysis.