Laboratory-Scale Production of Sterile Targeted Microbubbles

Perfluorocarbon gas-filled microbubbles are clinically used as ultrasound contrast agents. We have been developing targeted microbubbles based BACS (buoyancy activated cell sorting) or BUBLES (buoyancy enabled separation) for ex vivo cell isolation from bloods for circulating tumor cell (CTC) detection and hematopoietic cell isolation. Recently, we further applied targeted microbubbles for multimarker cell sorting, and as artificial antigen presenting cells (aAPC) for T cell activation and expansion by taking advantage of a number of interesting properties of lipid-shelled microbubbles. This chapter will describe the process of manufacturing sterile targeted microbubbles for research applications.