A Detachable Magnetic Nanodevice for the Efficient Capture and Subtype Identification of Circulating Tumor Cells

Abstract The effective capture and accurate identification of heterogeneous circulating tumor cells (CTCs) aid in guiding clinical diagnosis and personalized treatment of tumors. Herein, a core‐satellite‐sized magnetic separable nanodevice (denoted as MS‐RI) is developed for the capture and subtype identification of heterogeneous CTCs by identifying the protein targets of CTCs in vitro and imaging intracellular nucleic acid targets of CTCs in situ. Upon the separation of CTCs by MS‐RI using aptamers as capture elements, the programmatically dissociated satellite particles aim to internalize into the cells for simultaneous profiling of microRNA‐21 and microRNA‐141. By virtue of the validated magnetic separation of the core structure, the high affinity of the aptamer, and the high sensitivity of the recognition imaging (RI) module, MS‐RI allows the isolation and subtyping of CTCs in clinical samples from breast cancer patients. This strategy of combining extracellular recognition and intracellular imaging pioneers a new paradigm for the capture and precision subtyping of heterogeneous CTCs.