Single-cell phenotypic profiling of CTCs in whole blood using an integrated microfluidic device.

Single-cell phenotypic profiling of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the blood of cancer patients can reveal vital tumor biology information. Even though various approaches have been provided to enrich and detect CTCs, it remains challenging for consecutive CTC sorting, enumeration, and single-cell characterizations. Here, we report an integrated microfluidic device (IMD) for single-cell phenotypic profiling of CTCs that enables automated CTCs sorting from whole blood following continuous single-cell phenotypic analysis while satisfying the requirements of both high purity (92 +/- 3%) of cell sorting and high-throughput processing capacity (5 mL whole blood/3 h). Using this new technique we test the phenotypes of individual CTCs collected from xenograft tumor-bearing mice and colorectal (CRC) patients at different tumor stages. We obtained a correlation between CTC characterization and clinical tumor stage and treatment response. The developed IMD offers a high-throughput, convenient, and rapid strategy to study individual CTCs toward minimally invasive cancer therapy prediction and disease monitoring and has the potential to be translated to clinic for liquid biopsy.