Related Experiment Video For Microfluidics
Updated: Apr 29, 2026
Microfluidics-based High-throughput Circulating Tumor Cell Sorting and Single-cell Sequencing Technology
Published on: November 14, 2025
Towards Engineered Processes for Sequencing-Based Analysis of Single Circulating Tumor Cells
Viktor A Adalsteinsson1, J Christopher Love1
1The David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA ; Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA ; The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02412, USA.
Abstract:
Sequencing-based analysis of single circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of metastatic cancer and improve clinical care. Technologies exist to enrich, identify, recover, and sequence single cells, but to enable systematic routine analysis of single CTCs from a range of cancer patients, there is a need to establish processes that efficiently integrate these specific operations. Such engineered processes should address challenges associated with the yield and viability of enriched CTCs, the robust identification of candidate single CTCs with minimal degradation of DNA, the bias in whole-genome amplification, and the efficient handling of candidate single CTCs or their amplified DNA products. Advances in methods for single-cell analysis and nanoscale technologies suggest opportunities to overcome these challenges, and could create integrated platforms that perform several of the unit operations together. Ultimately, technologies should be selected or adapted for optimal performance and compatibility in an integrated process.
