微流控芯片分选临床样品中循环肿瘤细胞的研究进展

癌症作为常见病正严重威胁着我国乃至全球居民的健康。循环肿瘤细胞(CTCs)是一类由癌变部位释放并进入血液中的癌细胞,其在癌症的早期诊断、个体化及肿瘤转移机制研究等方面的作用正逐渐被发现和认可,但由于血液中的CTCs含量极少,对其分选极具挑战。微流控芯片作为一种微型化、高通量、集成化平台,在CTCs研究中彰显了独特的优势,相关报道也越来越多。随着研究的深入,微流控芯片技术不再局限于基于模型样品的方法学开发,而是更注重于能否用于临床实际样品中CTCs的检测,但目前未见该角度的综述报道。为此,文章综述了近年来用于临床实际样品CTCs分析的微流控芯片分选技术,并探讨了微流控芯片用于CTCs分选的发展趋势。

Application advances of microfluidic chips for sorting circulating tumor cells in clinical samples

Cancer is becoming a common disease threatening seriously to the human health. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is a kind of cancer cells released from tumors and circulates with bloodstream. It is gradually discovered of the potential value of CTCs in diagnosis of cancer in initial stage, individual treatment and research of metastasis mechanism. However, it is a very challenge task for sorting the extremely few CTCs in blood. Microfluidic chip, a miniaturized, high-throughput and integrated platform, shows the unique advantages in the study of CTCs. With the progress of the research, the technology is no longer limited to the development of sorting method based on model samples, but scientists pay more attention to the analysis of clinical samples. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no paper summing up the progress of microfluidic chip techniques applied to the analysis of clinical samples recently. This review focuses on those microfluidic techniques that have been applied to sorting CTCs from the blood of cancer patients. Meanwhile, we predict the trends of sorting CTCs in clinical samples using microfluidic chip technology.