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.
