A lab-on-a-chip for characterising and sorting cancer cells

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At present, more than one person dies from cancer every three minutes in the UK, or more than 440 per day, or more than 162,000 per annum. The projection of new cancer cases rises from about 298,000 per annum in 2007, to 432,000 by 2030 - an increase of 45% in the UK alone. The rise is explained almost entirely by the expected increase in the number of people living in the UK and the ageing population.The dominant cause of cancer-associated mortality is tumour metastasis. At some point in their growth, solid tumours start to shed tumour cells into the bloodstream. These cells are called circulating tumour cells (CTCs), which have been considered as seeds spreading through the bloodstream to metastatic sites. CTCs are also treated as surrogates allowing doctors to determine the course of therapy and watch how a cancer evolves. CTCs express considerable marker expression heterogeneity which has been recently recognised as a mechanism of resistance to systematic therapy. This project aims to reveal the characterisation of single CTCs by developing next generation lab-on-a-chip integrating microwave, ultrasonic and microfluidic technologies, which will characterise single CTCs and provide their real-time and label-free information for subsequent analyses.The lab-on-a-chip will measure the dielectric properties of single CTCs, allowing the association to cellular morphology, proliferation, metabolism, cytoskeleton, viability, and cytoplasm. This project will develop a hybrid device to facilitate monitoring the cancer progression and treatment effectiveness, and reveal the makeup of CTCs to address specific mutations and phenotypic alterations, which will act as the first step to understand CTCs' behaviours in metastasis.