ABSTRACT:
Despite the recent advancement of biotechnology and pharmaceutical research, cancers remain the leading cause of human mortality. It is vital to diagnose cancers at an early stage when treatment can dramatically improve prognosis. So far, low-cost and easy to operate devices, which allow efficient isolation and sensitive detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) for routine blood screening, remain lacking. This talk will introduce a micro fluidic platform (High-Density Self-Assembled-Cell-Array, HD-SACA system)[1] which can not only isolate single CTCs/CTMs from the real blood sample in one hour for rapid CTCs identification and diagnosis, together with a nano particle sensing system, but also conduct Tumor organelle drug screening for precision medicine. This system includes a high throughput 3D Micro-Dialysis and Self Assembled Cell Array (SACA) chip to quickly self-assemble cells into a densed monolayer (106 cells/cm2) for rapid staining and in-parallel inspection at high speed (6x106 cells/1 hour for 4 images).  The distinguished ratio can reach 1 to 1 billion, recovery rate more than 95%, and whole process can be finished in two hours for 4 ml blood sample [2]. In this research, we have successfully enumerating CTCs/CTMs by self-assembled cell array (SACA) chip system for more than 1000 patients with diagnosed colorectal cancers and others. We found that the CTC count in PB but not IMV correlates with disease stages. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy did not lead to decreased CTC count in both types of blood samples. With the combination of CTCs/CTMs and other biomarkers, the detection odds ratio can be higher than 21[3,4]. Due to the rapid and gentle process, the on-chip isolated CTCs are still in vital and can be further characterized and cultivated for the identification by using nano sensors for further prognosis by reading the information from cancer microenvironments in the Tumor-organoid on a chip [5].  The cultivated/expanded CTCs on chip, when forming Tumor-organelles, can be further used as drug testing targets to screening combinatory drugs for AI assisted precision medicine [6]. The Tumor-organoid on a chip can be further integrated with Liver-on-a-chip and Kidney-on-a-chip for not only combinatory drug testing, but also drug toxicity validation.