The incorporation of microfluidics into circulating tumor cell isolation for clinical applications

•Circulating tumor cells are rare cells that have potential as a liquid biopsy.•The introduction of microfluidics has increased the quality of isolation.•These technologies are being verified in the clinical setting.•Challenges going forward in include limitations on downstream analysis.

The second leading cause of death in the United States, cancer is at its most dangerous as it spreads to secondary locations. Cancer cells in the blood stream, or circulating tumor cells (CTCs), present an opportunity to study metastasis provided they may be extracted successfully from blood. Engineers have accelerated the development of technologies that achieve this goal based on exploiting differences between tumor cells and surrounding blood cells such as varying expression patterns of membrane proteins or physical characteristics. Collaboration with biologists and clinicians has allowed additional analysis and will lead to the use of these rare cells to their full potential in the fight against cancer.