Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) isolated directly from whole blood opens new perspectives for cancer monitoring and the development of personalized treatments. However, due to their rarity among the multitude of blood cells, it remains a challenge to recover them alive with high level of purity, i.e., with few remaining white blood cells, and in a time frame compatible with the clinical context. Microfluidic chips have emerged as promising tools to address these challenges. We propose a two-step workflow including a pre-enrichment step, performed by a size-based pre-enrichment system, and a purification step, performed by an immunomagnetic chip. Here, we describe the protocol for the fabrication of the immunomagnetic microchip, the preparation of the sample, and the procedure for injection into the microchip allowing the sorting of the CTCs.
Keywords: CTC recovery; Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC); Composite polymer; Immunomagnetic sorting; Microfabrication; Microfluidic chip; Sample purification.
© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.