Abstract
Malignant tumor is one of the main reasons causes the death of human beings, however, most of patients were not killed by carcinoma in situ but the metastasis of cancer cells. The presence and number of CTCs in blood has recently been demonstrated to provide significant prognostic information for patients. Although finding the few CTCs in about 7.5 mL of blood is clinically significant, but the detection of CTCs is currently difficult and time consuming. Thus, rapid and precise detection of CTCs is a big challenge in clinical applications and in lab researches. In this study, we present a chip based device to force cells forming high density monolayer cell array by the employment of gravity force and fluid force which has advantages of simple design, easily used and rapid detection. By labeling immunofluorescence, the cancer cells in the cell mixture can be easily detected from tens of thousands times of blood cells with naked eyes. This study, the chip was fabricated with SU-8 structure and standard glass slides, with the special design, the chip will provide a fluid force to make cells disperse uniformly and thus preventing cells stack into multilayer. In the study, the suitable cell density to form dense cell array and the identification capability were verified. The result conformed to the original predicted and shows optimistic applications for tissue engineering, drug testing and rare cell detections.