Towards High Performance Detection of Circulating Tumor Cells in Whole Blood

A novel dead-end affinity filtration system is presented for the enrichment of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from whole blood with high efficiency, selectivity and throughput. At the heart of the system lies an affinity membrane, which was prepared by chemical surface modification of a commercial micro-filter to exclusively allow for the specific adhesion of CTCs. First filtration experiments showed that the prepared membranes are highly permeable for blood cells and allow the efficient capture of cancer cells at high filtration pressure. This promising combination is expected to enable high quality enrichments, which are required for subsequent CTC identification and characterization.