Chinese Journal of Chromatography ›› 2014, Vol. 32 ›› Issue (1): 7-12.DOI: 10.3724/SP.J.1123.2013.08009

• Reviews • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Advances in isolation and enrichment of circulating tumor cells in microfluidic chips

DU Jinghui1, LIU Xu1, XU Xiaoping2   

  1. 1. Department of Clinical Laboratory, the First Teaching Hospital of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tianjin 300073, China;
    2. The University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital, Shenzhen 518053, China
  • Received:2013-08-13 Revised:2013-11-15 Online:2014-01-08 Published:2013-12-26

Abstract:

The research of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has drawn increasing attention in recent years, because its potential value in the early diagnosis of cancers, management of clinical treatment, development of personalized medicine, and exploring the mechanism of metastasis. However, the difficulty in using CTCs lies in their extremely low concentrations. Recently, microfluidic devices have shown the potential to efficiently isolate and detect rare CTCs in cancer patients. A variety of on-chip blood analysis has been demonstrated by several groups. The advantages of microfluidics include low cost, short reaction times, high throughput, and ease of use. Recently, a variety of microfluidic devices have been developed to CTCs isolation and enrichment which can realize high capture efficiency, high purity and high throughput. In this article, we review some of the recent works in microfluidic CTCs isolation and enrichment devices and discuss in what field should be done next based on our researches.

Key words: circulating tumor cells (CTCs), enrichment, isolation, microfluidic devices, review

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