Identifying the grade of bladder cancer cells using microfluidic chips based on impedance

Quantification of tumor cell heterogeneity is critical for clinical diagnostic and therapeutic applications, including evaluation of the cancerous stage of tumors. In this work, we presented a novel method to effectively distinguish the grade of bladder cancer at a single-cell level in both cell line and clinical cell samples. This was achieved by taking advantage of microdroplets and microelectrodes, which can encapsulate and then trap single cells for measuring their impedance in a label-free and non-invasive manner. These findings suggested that this impedance analysis device based on droplet microfluidics is promising in the fields of clinical and point-of-care diagnostics.