Circulating Tumor Cell Separation of Blood Cells and Sorting in novel Microfluidic approaches: a review

Abstract

Separation and interpretation of rebellious Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) originating from the primary tumor or cancer tissue plays a significant role in diagnostics, cancer progression analyses, suitable medicine exploration, and treatment proficiency examination. Cancer metastasis occurs when CTCs spread throughout the body and invade healthy tissues, leading to new tumors in that area. Although a dramatic rate of deaths begins from spreading CTCs around the body, valuable measures have been made to control their development. However, the first step is separating these harmful cells from the bloodstream and investigating their features. Having examined the characteristics of CTCs as cancer’s main strength, researchers can introduce complementary treatments that can affect cancerous cells without damaging the healthy cells. Therefore, according to their unique characteristics, numerous techniques have been established for continuous and fast separation and sorting of CTCs. Nevertheless, few separators enjoy the efficient performance and appropriate accuracy and can be produced in mass numbers due to the available fabrication equipment. Microfabrication advancements enable separators to combine the advantages of active and passive methods in a small-scale platform for probing individual cells and separation purposes. Reduction in reagents, sample volume, analysis time, and less harmfulness to patients are some of the motivations that encourage researchers to employ microfluidic instruments for CTCs separation from other blood cells over the last two decades. However, microfabrication limitations mean effective separators, and the diagnostic option they provide, are not readily available. Addressing these limitations requires optimizing the design and fabrication of separators such that they are reduced in their size and fabrication cost, while also maintaining high-throughput separating capability. The emergence of the Lab-On-a-Chip (LOC) and then Lab-On-a-CD (LOCD) technologies, having more inherent benefits than conventional microfluidic devices, has created new opportunities and become increasingly widespread in recent years. Evidence suggests that employing single methodologies or integrating approaches without sufficient understanding of potential outcomes is unlikely to result in successful diagnostic results. This paper contributes an extensive review of several separation systems, including fundamental theories and experimental details, and describes detailed operating principles and device performance.

COVID-19 and Human Immune System Responses

“…The function of white blood cells is to block entry of harmful toxicity and detect any cell changes because it travels throughout the body in blood cells (Farahinia, et al. [15]).…”

Ordering and Encapsulation in Viscoelastic Microfluidic Flows

“…This is useful in applications concerning single-cell analysis, which requires relatively quick formation of self-assembled cells for an implementable, highthroughput, relatively inexpensive and a parallel approach for compartmentalized analysis of single-cells [211], DNA [212] and drug-screening [213] in droplets [214]. For example optimal encapsulation of circulating tumour cells from blood cells requires non-overlapping ordered structures to reduce reagent demand, sample volume and analysis time [215]. Technologies such as Drop-Sequencing analysing genome transcripts of individual cells in droplets require non-overlapping ordered cells for deterministic encapsulation [122].…”