Development of a novel micro immune-magnetophoresis cell sorter

In this paper, we present a novel method to separate T-cell using immune-magnetophoresis (IMP) cell sorting chip. Our novel micro cell sorter utilizing the immune-affinity and the high gradient magnetic field is aiming for the separation of target T lymphocytes from biological suspensions such as whole blood. This micro IMP cell sorter also overcomes several weaknesses of existing micro magnetic-activated cell sorting (micro MACS) systems with novel functionalities, such as continuous operation, fully automated one step cell sorting, micro sized simple chip design, no sheath flow requirement and minimum waste of reagent. Furthermore, the labeling process, which is performed by either a manual work process or by additional integrated micro mixers as the pre-process, has been simplified without mixing of media. We expect that our novel micro IMP cell sorter can be used widely in biomedical applications, e.g. as a chip array system for an automated laboratory device, as a muTAS (micro Total Analysis System) or as an implantable micro medical system, etc.