Issue 9, 2015

A single inlet two-stage acoustophoresis chip enabling tumor cell enrichment from white blood cells

Abstract

Metastatic disease is responsible for most cancer deaths, and hematogenous spread through circulating tumor cells (CTC) is a prerequisite for tumor dissemination. CTCs may undergo epithelial–mesenchymal transition where many epithelial cell characteristics are lost. Therefore, CTC isolation systems relying on epithelial cell markers are at risk of losing important subpopulations of cells. Here, a simple acoustophoresis-based cell separation instrument is presented. Cells are uniquely separated while maintained in their initial suspending medium, thus eliminating the need for a secondary cell-free medium to hydrodynamically pre-position them before the separation. When characterizing the system using polystyrene particles, 99.6 ± 0.2% of 7 μm diameter particles were collected through one outlet while 98.8 ± 0.5% of 5 μm particles were recovered through a second outlet. Prostate cancer cells (DU145) spiked into blood were enriched from white blood cells at a sample flow rate of 100 μL min−1 providing 86.5 ± 6.7% recovery of the cancer cells with 1.1 ± 0.2% contamination of white blood cells. By increasing the acoustic intensity a recovery of 94.8 ± 2.8% of cancer cells was achieved with 2.2 ± 0.6% contamination of white blood cells. The single inlet approach makes this instrument insensitive to acoustic impedance mismatch; a phenomenon reported to importantly affect accuracy in multi-laminar flow stream acoustophoresis. It also offers a possibility of concentrating the recovered cells in the chip, as opposed to systems relying on hydrodynamic pre-positioning which commonly dilute the target cells.

Graphical abstract: A single inlet two-stage acoustophoresis chip enabling tumor cell enrichment from white blood cells

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
21 Jan 2015
Accepted
20 Mar 2015
First published
23 Mar 2015
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Lab Chip, 2015,15, 2102-2109

Author version available

A single inlet two-stage acoustophoresis chip enabling tumor cell enrichment from white blood cells

M. Antfolk, C. Antfolk, H. Lilja, T. Laurell and P. Augustsson, Lab Chip, 2015, 15, 2102 DOI: 10.1039/C5LC00078E

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements