Whole-blood sorting, enrichment and in situ immunolabeling of cellular subsets using acoustic microstreaming

Abstract

Analyzing undiluted whole human blood is a challenge due to its complex composition of hematopoietic cellular populations, nucleic acids, metabolites, and proteins. We present a novel multi-functional microfluidic acoustic streaming platform that enables sorting, enrichment and in situ identification of cellular subsets from whole blood. This single device platform, based on lateral cavity acoustic transducers (LCAT), enables (1) the sorting of undiluted donor whole blood into its cellular subsets (platelets, RBCs, and WBCs), (2) the enrichment and retrieval of breast cancer cells (MCF-7) spiked in donor whole blood at rare cell relevant concentrations (10 mL− 1), and (3) on-chip immunofluorescent labeling for the detection of specific target cellular populations by their known marker expression patterns. Our approach thus demonstrates a compact system that integrates upstream sample processing with downstream separation/enrichment, to carry out multi-parametric cell analysis for blood-based diagnosis and liquid biopsy blood sampling.