Modeling of circulating tumor cells via cell lines and mononuclear cells in a microfluidic disk

Cyto-analysis of rare cells often requires separation and detection with either procedure possesses substantial challenge. This paper presents a disk-based microfluidic platform for both procedures via immunomagnetic negative selection process. Proof-of-concept was conducted using wide range of MCF7 as target rare cells and spiked into Jurkat as non-target cells. Then, mononuclear cells (MNC) from healthy blood donors were mixed with MCF7s, modeling rare cells, and tested in the disk. Results show the average yield of detected MCF7 is near-constant 60±10% over a wide range of rarity from 10^-3 to 10^-6 and this yield also holds for MCF7/MNC complex mixture. Comparison with autoMACS and BD IMagnet separators revealed the average yield from the disk (60%) is superior to that of autoMACS (37.3%) and BD IMagnet (48.3%).