Issue 1, 2019

A high-throughput liquid biopsy for rapid rare cell separation from large-volume samples

Abstract

Liquid biopsy techniques for rare tumor cell separation from body fluids have shown enormous promise in cancer detection and prognosis monitoring. This work established a high-throughput liquid biopsy platform with a high recovery rate and a high cell viability based on a previously reported 2.5D micropore-arrayed filtration membrane. Thanks to its high porosity (>40.2%, edge-to-edge space between the adjacent micropores <4 μm), the achieved filtration throughputs can reach >110 mL min−1 for aqueous samples and >17 mL min−1 for undiluted whole blood, only driven by gravity with no need for any extra pressure loading. The recoveries of rare lung tumor cells (A549s) spiked in PBS (10 mL), unprocessed BALF (10 mL) and whole blood (5 mL) show high recovery rates (88.0 ± 3.7%, 86.0 ± 5.3% and 83.2 ± 6.2%, respectively, n = 5 for every trial) and prove the high performance of this platform. Successful detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from whole blood samples (5 mL) of lung cancer patients (n = 5) was demonstrated. In addition, it was both numerically and experimentally proved that a small edge-to-edge space was significant to improve the viability of the recovered cells and the purity of the target cell recovery, which was reported for the first time to the best of the authors' knowledge. This high-throughput technique will expand the detecting targets of liquid biopsy from the presently focused CTCs in whole blood to the exfoliated tumor cells (ETCs) in other large-volume clinical samples, such as BALF, urine and pleural fluid. Meanwhile, the technique is easy to operate and ready for integration with other separation and analysis tools to fulfill a powerful system for practical clinical applications of liquid biopsy.

Graphical abstract: A high-throughput liquid biopsy for rapid rare cell separation from large-volume samples

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
03 oct. 2018
Accepted
21 nov. 2018
First published
05 déc. 2018

Lab Chip, 2019,19, 68-78

A high-throughput liquid biopsy for rapid rare cell separation from large-volume samples

Y. Liu, T. Li, M. Xu, W. Zhang, Y. Xiong, L. Nie, Q. Wang, H. Li and W. Wang, Lab Chip, 2019, 19, 68 DOI: 10.1039/C8LC01048J

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements