%0 Journal Article
%T Fast and Label
%A Adam M. Dimmick
%A Charles L. Wilkerson
%A Clementine A. Lemaire
%A Corinne Renier
%A Dino Di Carlo
%A Elodie Sollier-Christen
%A James Che
%A Kuo-Wei Huang
%A Meghah Vuppalapaty
%A Michael L. Kochersperger
%A Michael W. Chiu
%A Nasim A. Barzanian
%A Robert F. Englert
%A Sean Z. Liu
%A Stefanie S. Jeffrey
%A Stephan Hengstler
%A Steve C. Crouse
%A Vishnu C. Ramani
%J SLAS TECHNOLOGY: Translating Life Sciences Innovation
%@ 2472-6311
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/2472630317738698
%X Tumor tissue biopsies are invasive, costly, and collect a limited cell population not completely reflective of patient cancer cell diversity. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) can be isolated from a simple blood draw and may be representative of the diverse biology from multiple tumor sites. The VTX-1 Liquid Biopsy System was designed to automate the isolation of clinically relevant CTC populations, making the CTCs available for easy analysis. We present here the transition from a cutting-edge microfluidic innovation in the lab to a commercial, automated system for isolating CTCs directly from whole blood. As the technology evolved into a commercial system, flexible polydimethylsiloxane microfluidic chips were replaced by rigid poly(methyl methacrylate) chips for a 2.2-fold increase in cell recovery. Automating the fluidic processing with the VTX-1 further improved cancer cell recovery by nearly 1.4-fold, with a 2.8-fold decrease in contaminating white blood cells and overall improved reproducibility. Two isolation protocols were optimized that favor either the cancer cell recovery (up to 71.6% recovery) or sample purity (¡Ü100 white blood cells/mL). The VTX-1¡¯s performance was further tested with three different spiked breast or lung cancer cell lines, with 69.0% to 79.5% cell recovery. Finally, several cancer research applications are presented using the commercial VTX-1 system
%K circulating tumor cells (CTCs)
%K liquid biopsy
%K VTX-1 Liquid Biopsy System
%K polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) deformation
%K poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) microfluidic chips
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2472630317738698