Continuous isolation of monocytes using a magnetophoretic-based microfluidic Chip

Monocytes play an important role in the immune system and are responsible for phagocytizing and degrading foreign microorganisms in the body. The isolation of monocytes is important in various immunological applications such as in-vitro culture of dendritic cells. We present a magnetophoretic-based microfluidic chip for rapid isolation of highly purified, untouched monocytes from human blood by a negative selection method. This bioseparation platform integrates several unique features into a microfluidic device, including locally engineered magnetic field gradients and a continuous flow with a buffer switching scheme to improve the performance of the cell separation process. The results indicate high monocyte purity and recovery performances at a volumetric flow rate that is nearly an order of magnitude larger than comparable microfluidic devices reported in literature. In addition, a comprehensive 2-D computational modeling is performed to determine the cell trajectory and trapping length within the microfluidic chip. Furthermore, the effects of channel height, substrate thickness, cell size, number of beads per cell, and sample flow rate on the cell separation performance are studied.