A Parallelable 3D Microfluidic Chip for Circulating‐Tumor‐Cell Capture at Ultra‐High Throughput and Wide Flow Rate Range

Abstract

Isolation and characterization of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) provide the possibility for early diagnosis and personalized treatment of cancer. Due to the complexity of blood composition and the rarity of CTCs, existing technologies still have issues in balancing the sample throughput, separate efficiency, and operation convenience. Here, a concept is proposed to improve CTCs capture performance by reforming the separation unit and rearranging functionally independent modules into 3D configuration based on the previous microfluidic chip. In this way, the novel 3D‐CTC chip can significantly decrease to a smaller size with enhanced capture efficiency (>89%) at an ultra‐high throughput (70 mL h−1 with whole blood sample) over a wide range of flow rates (5–70 mL h−1). The capability of the developed chip can be improved manyfold by paralleling single chips whether the samples are injected by pump or manually. The clinical experiments of colorectal cancer (CRC) patients on these chips demonstrate a positive correlation between CTCs counts (5–34 CTCs per 2 mL whole blood) and cancer stages. In general, the proposed compact 3D‐CTC chip provides high performance with low requirements of experiment conditions, which implies an enormous potential for industrial production and handy clinical test.