EMPOWERING PRECISION MEDICINE: MAPPING METASTATIC POTENTIAL THROUGH DEPIS-ENABLED MICROCHIP FOR CANCER CELL CAPTURE AND ANALYSIS

Abstract

Metastasis, the leading cause of cancer-related deaths, is the spread of cancer to other body regions. This process is characterized by the migration of tumor cells, known as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), into distant regions of the body during the disease progression. The number of CTCs is relatively low (order of 1 cell/mL), but their detection might hold potential in cancer diagnostics, prognostics, and targeted therapeutics, through CTC characterization. However, current detection methods result in high false negative rates due to their dependency on cell surface-markers expression rendering a major population of CTCs undetected. In addition, these methods are expensive and do not allow post-capture cell analysis. Label-free methods, an alternative to detect CTCs, have emerged and defied these drawbacks by relying on the physical characteristics of the cells such as shape, size, deformability, density, and surface charge. Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is a developing application of label-free platforms for CTC detection that uses non-uniform electric fields to induce particle motion and manipulation to separate and differentiate CTCs from multiple origins in the same sample. In this project, we developed a bimodal DEP-based platform for the DEP-based trapping and EIS-based detection and electrical characterization of three MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells subtypes using inkjet technology to print an array of silver electrodes. Our results show that our platform is capable of trapping and separating populations of cells with high sensitivity, specificity, and enumerating and differentiating populations based on their cell count and internal physiology.