Developing a droplet-based microfluidic device for CTC single-cell encapsulation and downstream molecular analysis

Single-cell isolation followed by analyzing them to extract the cellular information of the targeted cell has drawn much attention in recent years. This process could be assigned to the circulating tumor cells to discover significant information utilized in personalized medicine. Due to the low number and micron size of CTCs, stair-like spiral microfluidic, a modified design of simple spiral microfluidic to separate the CTCs, was used to enrich the rare CTCs. This novel design would enhance the separation efficiency and resolution, which is a crucial step in the single-cell isolation of rare cells. Automation and integration of the different steps of a microfluidic platform would provide a wide range of advantages involving reducing labor cost, decreasing time consumption, and increasing the potential for commercialization applications. This step is followed by novel static droplet arrays (SDA) microfluidic to isolate the CTCs with a resolution of single-cell trapped in a static droplet for downstream analysis. This novel design of SDA could be utilized in applications with low sample input which was the limitation of conventional droplet microfluidics. In this study, numerical simulation was utilized to optimize the efficiency of single-cell encapsulation of CTCs. A stair-like spiral microfluidic with different aspect-ratio in the cross section integrated to a SDA, optimized by placing a venture in the path of the main channel, was developed to enhance the single-cell encapsulation efficiency which was studied by numerical simulation.