Sound to guide cells

By combining acoustic fields and liquid flows in microchannels we develop tools to chart and separatebiological particles based on their bio-mechanical properties. I will present an overview of three ongoingprojects where acoustic forces are utilized to separate blood cells.We studied the packing behavior of whole blood in a sound field. We discovered that cells self-organizesuch that red blood cells occupy a region nearest the acoustic pressure node while cancer cells migrateto the plasma interface. This can be done in a flow-through device and more than 90% of red blood cellscan be removed in continuous flow while recovering >50% of the target cells. [1]In a second project, we developed a method to separate and measure the acoustic properties ofthousands of single cells by tracking their location in a media that forms a gradient in acoustic properties.The cells migrate due to the sound field until reaching their point of zero acoustic contrast. From single-cell properties, we can predict the behavior of cells in any medium and acoustic field and design andoptimize separation schemes. [2]In another project, we showed that we can enrich clusters of circulating tumor cells from white bloodcells by acoustic separation, Fig 1. We analyzed blood from 12 patients with advanced-stage prostatecancer and compared that to blood from 20 healthy donors. We found that circulating tumor cell clustersin most patients but in very few of the control subjects. [3]Our vision is that we will be able to integrate the different unit operations for cell separation that we havedemonstrated into one process flow, thus building a system that can take whole blood as input andhighly refined sub-populations of cells as output. References[1] Soller, in https://acoustofluidics.net/archive/materials/Acoustofluidics_2023_Materials.pdf (2023).[2] https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms11556 (2016).[3] https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.analchem.3c05371 (2024).