Today’s Spotlight features an image, courtesy of Suman Bose and Chong Shen, showing cells traveling through the microfluidic device.
Tumor cells circulating in a patient’s bloodstream can yield a great deal of information on how a tumor is responding to treatment and what drugs might be more effective against it. But first, these rare cells have to be captured and isolated from the many other cells found in a blood sample.
Many scientists are now working on microfluidic devices that can isolate circulating tumor cells (CTCs), but most of these have two major limitations: It takes too long to process a sufficient amount of blood, and there is no good way to extract cancer cells for analysis after their capture.
A new device from researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital overcomes those obstacles.
Read more.
Tumor cells circulating in a patient’s bloodstream can yield a great deal of information on how a tumor is responding to treatment and what drugs might be more effective against it. But first, these rare cells have to be captured and isolated from the many other cells found in a blood sample.
Many scientists are now working on microfluidic devices that can isolate circulating tumor cells (CTCs), but most of these have two major limitations: It takes too long to process a sufficient amount of blood, and there is no good way to extract cancer cells for analysis after their capture.
A new device from researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital overcomes those obstacles.
Read more.