Simultaneous biochemical and functional phenotyping of single circulating tumor cells using ultrahigh throughput and recovery microfluidic devices
Yang Liu, Wujun Zhao, Rui Cheng, Jamie Hodgson, Mary G. Egan, Christen N. Cooper Pope, Petros Nikolinakos, Leidong Mao
Abstract
. Its short processing time (10 minutes for a 10 mL sample), together with a close-to-complete CTC recovery (99.70% recovery rate) and a low WBC contamination (4.07-log depletion rate by removing 99.992% of leukocytes), results in adequate and functional CTCs for subsequent studies in the single-cell migration device. For the first time, we employ this new approach to query CTCs with single-cell resolution in accordance with their expression of phenotypic surface markers and migration properties, revealing the dynamic phenotypes and the existence of a high-motility subpopulation of CTCs in blood samples from metastatic lung cancer patients. This method could be adopted to study the biological and clinical value of invasive CTC phenotypes.