Research progress on enrichment and isolation of circulating tumor cells using immunomagnetic separation based microfluidic technology

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) exists in peripheral blood of patients with a variety of malignant tumors, the accurate detection of CTCs helps early detection of cancer, and can be used to guide individualized treatment of cancer patients, rapid assessment of tumor chemotherapy drugs and detection of tumor recurrence. However, the CTCs in peripheral blood of cancer patients were extremely low, their detection requires efficient and specific enrichment and separation methods. The new microfluidic technology can accurately control the microliquid preciously, combined with the immunomagnetic separation technology, has been applied in detecting CTCs, which can save the blood samples of CTCs, has the advantages of simple operation, fast sorting speed, high specificity and high purity.(Chin J Lab Med, 2016, 39: 64-67) Key words: Neoplastic cells, circulating; Microfluidic analytical techniques; Immunomagnetic separation