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High-Throughput Separation of White Blood Cells From Whole Blood Using Inertial Microfluidics

Jun Zhang, Dan Yuan, Ronald Sluyter

    IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems
    |September 4, 2017
    PubMed

    Insights

    This study introduces a microfluidic device for efficient white blood cell (WBC) separation. The platform achieves high purity and throughput, crucial for immune status analysis and diagnostics.

    Area of Science:

    • Biomedical Engineering
    • Microfluidics
    • Cell Separation Technology

    Background:

    • White blood cells (WBCs) are vital for immune status assessment, but their low concentration (0.1% of blood cells) necessitates efficient separation.
    • Accurate separation of WBCs is critical for numerous scientific, clinical, and diagnostic applications.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To develop a continuous, high-throughput microfluidic platform for isolating white blood cells (WBCs) from whole blood.
    • To utilize differential inertial focusing in serpentine microchannels for efficient cell separation.

    Main Methods:

    • Characterization of separation performance using polystyrene beads in serpentine microchannels.
    • Investigation of Jurkat cell focusing and separation in spiked blood to simulate WBC behavior.
    • Separation of WBCs from human whole blood using flow cytometry for purity assessment.

    Main Results:

    • Polystyrene bead purity increased from 0.1% to 80.3% with a 28x enrichment ratio after two separation stages.
    • WBC purity reached 48% with a 10x enrichment ratio from human whole blood after two stages.
    • A parallelized device achieved a high processing flow rate of 288 ml/h for diluted whole blood.

    Conclusions:

    • The developed microfluidic device offers a continuous and high-throughput method for WBC separation.
    • This technology shows potential as a key upstream component for integrated microfluidic blood analysis systems.
    • The platform's efficiency in isolating WBCs can advance various diagnostic and research applications.

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