I-Corps: Improving Acoustophoretic-based Cell Sorting Technologies

I-Corps项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力包括改进癌症诊断、更准确的个性化治疗和减少与癌症有关的公共卫生负担。该项目旨在将基于声学的细胞分选技术商业化，并提供诊断和治疗设备，仅在美国就利用了大约140亿美元的液体活检市场。循环肿瘤细胞（CTCs）已被确定为许多肿瘤实体的重要预后生物标志物，如乳腺癌、前列腺癌、肺癌和结肠癌。然而，从癌症患者外周血中捕获高纯度的活ctc仍然是一个重大的技术挑战。与其他技术相比，基于声学的技术最有前途，因为使用无标签和无接触分选在保持生物细胞的完整性、功能和活力方面具有固有优势。声学CTC隔离装置一旦商业化，可被癌症研究人员用于研究癌症转移和发现新药，可被医生用于癌症诊断和预后评估，并可用于开发个性化免疫疗法以提高治愈率。例如，对分类和扩展的患者特异性ctc的下游分析可能会显著提高最新突破性免疫治疗方法的反应率。这个I-Corps项目旨在开发商业上可行的声学细胞分选设备，该设备基于研究中开发的最新微流体技术。术语“微流体”涉及利用微米或亚微米尺寸的微型化结构对亚微升或更小体积的流体样品进行微型化处理。利用成熟的微加工技术，在微流控平台中实现传统实验室过程的小型化已经引起了人们的极大关注，并导致了所谓的芯片实验室设备的发展。Lab-on-a-Chip旨在将生化过程的集成、小型化、并行化和自动化，实现在几平方毫米到几平方厘米大小的小芯片上。较高的自动化程度和降低的能耗使这种微流体装置成为护理点（PoC）诊断的优秀候选者。该团队利用表面声波制造并测试了一种新型微流控平台，该平台可以有效地从癌症患者的外周血样本中过滤出循环肿瘤细胞（ctc）。这是一种通用的捕获方案，因为ctc被认为是一般的生物标志物，即大多数癌症类型在血液或淋巴系统中释放ctc。这种基于声学的细胞分选平台是一种很有前途的方法，可以捕获无标签和无接触的ctc，并保留其固有的生物学特性。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project includes improved cancer diagnostics, more accurate personalized treatments, and reduced public health burden related to cancer. The project is aimed at commercializing acoustic-based cell sorting technologies and providing diagnostic and therapeutic devices, taking advantage of the estimated US $14 billion liquid biopsy market in the United States alone. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have already been established as important prognostic biomarkers in many tumor entities namely breast, prostate, lung and colon cancer. However, capture of viable CTCs at high purity from the peripheral blood of cancer patients still poses a significant technical challenge. The acoustic-based techniques are mostly promising, compared to other technologies, due to the inherent advantages in preserving the integrity, functionality, and viability of biological cells using label-free and contact-free sorting. The acoustic CTC isolation devices, once commercialized, can be used by cancer researchers to study cancer metastasis and discover new drugs, can be used by medical doctors for cancer diagnostics and prognosis evaluation, and can be used to develop personalized immunotherapies to increase the cure rate. As an example, the downstream analyses of the sorted and expanded patient-specific CTCs may significantly increase the response rate of the latest groundbreaking immunotherapeutic approaches.This I-Corps project aims to develop commercially viable acoustic cell sorting devices based on the latest microfluidics technologies developed in research. The term 'microfluidics' relates to miniaturized handling of fluidic samples of sub-microliter or lower volume by utilizing miniaturized structures ranging in micron or submicron dimensions. Miniaturization of conventional laboratory processes in microfluidic platforms using well-established microfabrication technology has drawn great attention, and led to the development of the so-called Lab-on-a-Chip devices. Lab-on-a-Chip aims at integration, miniaturization, parallelization, and automation of biochemical processes, performed into a small chip of a few square millimeters to a few square centimeters in size. The higher degree of automation and the reduced energy consumption renders such microfluidic devices excellent candidates for point of care (PoC) diagnostics. This team fabricated and tested a novel microfluidic platform using surface acoustic waves that can effectively filter out circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from peripheral blood samples of cancer patients. This is a generic capture scheme since CTCs are considered to be general biomarkers i.e., most cancer types shed CTCs in the bloodstream or the lymphatic system. This acoustic-based cell sorting platform is a promising method for capturing CTCs label-free and contact-free, preserving their inherent biological characteristics.