Enrichment of rare cells from blood

Abstract

According World Health Organization (WHO) cancers number among the leading causes of illness and mortality worldwide. The significance of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) for clinical cancer management has been widely recognized. Despite the presence of a vast number of academic and commercial technologies, the lack of a standardized and optimized platform to isolate these rare cells has been widely noted. In this thesis, a thorough study to address the limitations of current CTC isolation platforms is presented. A negative selection approach, which avoids labeling the cells or defining their size, has been recommended as an optimal approach to enrich rare CTCs from whole blood for in vitro diagnostics. Based on this, three different versions of CTC enrichment platforms are successfully developed using techniques such as microfabrication and microfluidics. The proposed CTC isolation platforms have wide contribution in advancing cancer biology research and clinical cancer management.