Thanks to Steve Pemberton, who mentioned this June 2010 talk by Daniel Haber given during a symposium at the Koch Institute on integrative approaches to cancer. Haber is collaborating with Mehmet Toner on a microfluidics system for detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs). Recently their work was featured in a FluidicMEMS post on On-Q-ity, which is commercializing this technology.
This talk gives much more detail on the operation and development of the CTC-chip, including a new design involving a herringbone mixer. The herringbone mixer creates swirls of fluid that drive cells within the stream to contact the walls of the microchannel (which are coated with antibodies). If the last post left you wanting to know more, definitely check this out.
In addition, all of the talks from the symposium are on-line — a nice way to learn about some of the latest approaches to oncology coming out of academia.
For more on herringbone mixers:
- Original Whitesides paper on the microfluidic herringbone mixer
- A Practical Guide to the Staggered Herringbone Mixer from Paul Yager’s group
Related posts:
One Comment
Lily, thanks for the shout out and the additional info on the herringbone mixers. It’s been a busy week for CTC technology with a couple of abstracts that a relavent to your post.
First is an abstract that Anthony Williams posted on the CTC & Stem Cell group on LinkedIN (I highly reccomend this group for it’s low spam, and high value content, much like your blog). Here’s the link: http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2010/09/27/1078-0432.CCR-10-1105.abstract. The Abstract is titled “Portable Filter-Based Microdevice for Detection and Characterization of Circulating Tumor Cells”.
Second is an another abstract from AACR by researchers from Genentech who found good concordance of the primary tumor to CTC character for Her-2 expression in breast cancer patients. Here is the link to this abstract: http://www.aacr.org/Uploads/DocumentRepository/2010_conf/MD/moldia10_abstracts_proffered.pdf
Enjoy!