ACouWash : A standalone instrument for the washing, separation and enrichment of cells.

We developed the AcouWash (Figures 1 and 2), a benchtop instrument for flow-through cell and particle separation by acoustophoresis. Building on previous research [1-4] AcouWash can re-suspend cells in new medium, separate cells based on size or acoustic properties, or enrich cells, Figure 3. We present our initial evaluation of AcouWash regarding size-based separation of particles, cell washing, cell viability, and time savings compared to centrifugation. We repeatedly recovered 90-100% of target cells and particles, washed away 99.9% of a small fluorescent tracer molecule, viability of cells was unchanged, and reduced the time for standard cell labelling by 50%.