Abstract
It is an important issue to have real-time and highly sensitive detection of the disease. For a tumor in the early stage, the concentration of disseminated cells circulatinge in the blood is extremely low, making the detection of low concentration cancer cells difficult. Conventional methods for detecting small amount of cells include culture-based techniques and enzyme-linked immunospots (ELISPOT). However, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to increas the number of cells by culture or ELISPOT to a number that suffices for measurement. Another approach, flow cytometry (FCM) has been established for detecting low concentration of cancer cells. However, the detection sensitivity of FCM is approximately 0.01%. In this thesis, combining the magnetic bead and fluorescence in the microfluid system was applied to obtain rapid and sensitive detection of cancer cells. Microfluidic system has a number of advantages, including rapid detection of small amounts of samples, low-cost, and disposable. The detection of cancer cells is made by measuring the fluorescence which is conjugated with the first marker of the specific cells in the micro-reaction chamber. Additionally, the magnetic bead is adopted to conjugated with the second marker of the specific cells. The magnet is applied in the second reaction zone of the microfluid system to isolate the specific cells. The results show the detection sensitivity of the cancer cells is around 0.001% within 5 seconds period of the exposure time. And the percentage of biological cells can be transported into another reaction zone of microfluid system for above 95%. As a result, the immune magnetic bead-based microfluidic system successfully integrates rapid and high sensitivity on cancer cell detection .