Chinese Journal of Chromatography ›› 2017, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (1): 129-137.DOI: 10.3724/SP.J.1123.2016.09005

• Reviews • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Application advances of microfluidic chips for sorting circulating tumor cells in clinical samples

BAO James Jianmin, WANG Dandan, LI Youxin   

  1. School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Collaborative Innovation Center of Tianjin Chemical Engineering, Tianjin Key Laboratory for Modern Drug Delivery & High-Efficiency, Tianjin 300072, China
  • Received:2016-09-01 Online:2017-01-08 Published:2013-05-06
  • Supported by:

    National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21375093, 21605112); Special Research Found for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (No. 20130032120081); Youth Fund of the Science and Technology Committee of Tianjin Municipal Government (No. 15JCQNJC43200).

Abstract:

Cancer is becoming a common disease threatening seriously to the human health. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is a kind of cancer cells released from tumors and circulates with bloodstream. It is gradually discovered of the potential value of CTCs in diagnosis of cancer in initial stage, individual treatment and research of metastasis mechanism. However, it is a very challenge task for sorting the extremely few CTCs in blood. Microfluidic chip, a miniaturized, high-throughput and integrated platform, shows the unique advantages in the study of CTCs. With the progress of the research, the technology is no longer limited to the development of sorting method based on model samples, but scientists pay more attention to the analysis of clinical samples. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no paper summing up the progress of microfluidic chip techniques applied to the analysis of clinical samples recently. This review focuses on those microfluidic techniques that have been applied to sorting CTCs from the blood of cancer patients. Meanwhile, we predict the trends of sorting CTCs in clinical samples using microfluidic chip technology.

Key words: circulating tumor cells (CTCs), clinical samples, microfluidic chip, review, sorting

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