Automated Microfluidic Instrument for Label-Free and High-Throughput Cell Separation

Microfluidic technologies for cell separation were reported frequently in recent years. However, a compact microfluidic instrument enabling thoroughly automated cell separation is still rarely reported until today due to the difficult hybrid between the macrosized fluidic control system and the microsized microfluidic device. In this work, we propose a novel and automated microfluidic instrument to realize size based separation of cancer cells in a label-free and high throughput manner. Briefly, the instrument is equipped with a fully integrated microfluidic device and a set of robust fluid driven and control units, and the instrument functions of precise fluid infusion and high-throughput cell separation are guaranteed by a flow regulatory chip and two cell separation chips which are the key components of the microfluidic device. With optimized control programs, the instrument is successfully applied to automatically sort human breast adenocarcinoma cell line MCF-7 from 5 mL of diluted human blood with a high recovery ratio of similar to 85% within a rapid processing time of similar to 23 min. We envision that our microfluidic instrument will be potentially useful in many biomedical applications, especially cell separation, enrichment, and concentration for the purpose of cell culture and analysis.