Cell isolation system for rare Circulating Tumor Cell

For molecular analysis of the rare cells, such as Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs), the rare cells isolation from the suspension which contains large population of other cells on the single cells level is required. In this paper, we fabricated and demonstrated a cell isolation system for rare CTCs. We utilized the technique of convective self-assembly, which is a technique for depositing uniform onto the microfluidic device, to array single CTCs. Under the suspended cancer cells experiments, we demonstrated that by using this system, the collection efficiency of cells which could be deposited on the microfluidic device was 98.3% while the flow rate was 57.1 μl/min. This system will be conducive to single rare cells analysis because the deposited cells could be picked up by glass pipette easily.