Fabrication of microdevices for separation of circulating tumor cell using lateral magnetophoresis and immunomagnetic nanobeads

This paper presents the design and fabrication of the microdevice for separation of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from human whole blood based on lateral magnetophoresis principle and immunomagnetic nanobeads with the antiepithelial cell adhesive molecule (EpCAM) antibodies that selectively bind to epithelial cancer cells. We designed damascene v-shaped 60 μm-thick Nickel-Cobalt (Ni-Co) ferromagnetic wires with a flat zone and fabricated with micromachining technologies. The separation is carried out through lateral magnetophoresis, stimulated by magnetic field gradient-based isolation technologies. Experimentally, first, we observed the effect of external static magnetic intensity on the isolation rates. And we showed that microdevices isolates about 93% of the spiked CTCs cancer cells (MCF-7, a breast cancer cell line) in human whole blood at a flow rate of 40/100 μL/min with respect to human whole blood/buffer solution. For the overall isolation, it takes 15 min to process and analyze 500 μL of human whole blood.