Uniform magnetic mobility in a curved magnetophoretic channel

This paper reports a curved channel design of an immune-magnetophoretic cell sorter for uniform magnetic mobility which provides an advanced capture process between the target cells and magnetic particles. Furthermore the design prevents unwanted immobilization of magnetic particles and cell-particle complexes on the channel walls. The curved channel has been designed for avoiding magnetic field gradient vectors reversible to flow direction that result immobilization as well as slow speed of the particles. Consequently, S-shape curved magnetophoretic channel has been fabricated along the circumferences of 2 axial-poled magnets in PMMA substrate. The cell sorter has been demonstrated for T lymphocyte sorting from a cell mixture. The results showed more than 3 times higher recovery rate of the target cell in comparison with a straight micro channel and competitive cell sorting performances over conventional manual process.