[Advances in isolation and enrichment of circulating tumor cells in microfluidic chips]

The research of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has drawn increasing attention in recent years, because its potential value in the early diagnosis of cancers, management of clinical treatment, development of personalized medicine, and exploring the mechanism of metastasis. However, the difficulty in using CTCs lies in their extremely low concentrations. Recently, microfluidic devices have shown the potential to efficiently isolate and detect rare CTCs in cancer patients. A variety of on-chip blood analysis has been demonstrated by several groups. The advantages of microfluidics include low cost, short reaction times, high throughput, and ease of use. Recently, a variety of microfluidic devices have been developed to CTCs isolation and enrichment which can realize high capture efficiency, high purity and high throughput. In this article, we review some of the recent works in microfluidic CTCs isolation and enrichment devices and discuss in what field should be done next based on our researches.