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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Title: High Throughput, Label-free Enrichment of Circulating Tumor Cell Clusters Via Micromachined Polymer Chips
Committee:
Dr. Sarioglu, Advisor
Dr. Frazier, Chair
Dr. McDonald
Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to develop a robust and highly efficient technology for isolation of extremely rare circulating tumor cell clusters (CTC-clusters) from the blood samples of cancer patients by the utilization of microfabrication techniques. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are the cancer cells that detach from the primary tumor and manage to intravasate into bloodstream of patients. CTCs are responsible for distant organ metastasis and inherit valuable information for the clinical management of the disease. Isolation of extremely rare and highly aggressive aggregates of CTCs, called CTC-clusters, from the blood samples of cancer patients is critical for further investigation of CTC-clusters and their potential implications for metastatic cancer. Although CTC enrichment technologies have been developed to isolate single tumor cells efficiently, their sensitivity and specificity for capturing CTC-clusters are low due to high shear force, potentially damaging and dissociating the clusters. Recently developed technologies that are specifically designed to isolate CTC-clusters fail to satisfy enough processing throughput, limiting their use in clinical applications where large amount of blood needs to be processed due to extreme scarcity of CTC-clusters. Furthermore, they fall short of isolating relatively smaller 2 to 4-cell clusters, which constitute the majority of clusters observed in cancer patients. In the proposed work, we introduce the “Cluster-Wells”, which allows label-free enrichment of viable CTC-clusters from unprocessed whole blood with unprecedented capture efficiency of >90% and blood processing throughput of >25 mL/h. Cluster-Wells addresses the key challenge of preserving the integrity of CTC-clusters by its gentle nature and enables viable retrieval of captured clusters directly from the chip for molecular and functional analyses.
