A drop-shaped deterministic lateral displacement microfluidic chip for accurate size-based circulating tumor cells separation

Abstract Cells released from the primary tumor to the peripheral blood are referred to as circulating tumor cells (CTCs). The detection of CTCs at an early stage can be instructive to the implementation of follow-up treatments. However, due to the rarity of CTCs in the peripheral blood, it is urgent to develop an accurate CTC separation method. Here, we propose a drop-shaped deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) microfluidic chip to accurately separate and enumerate CTCs with cost-effective and simple testing procedures. The drop-shaped DLD enhanced performance for the separation of white blood cells (WBCs) and CTCs, which achieved CTCs high separation efficiency (>99%) and >50% CTCs purity. Our drop-shaped DLD microfluidic chip offers a label-free and highly reliable CTCs separation solution and is promising to low-cost point-of-care CTCs detection.