Multisample microfluidic technology characterizes cancer cell deformability

It’s thought that aggressive cancer cells are “squishier” than normal cells, and that this helps them move within the body to form metastases. Recently developed techniques can measure deformability, but are not designed for the simultaneous analysis of many cell samples required in diagnostics or drug screening. This led chemical engineers, who report their work in APL Bioengineering, to develop a high-throughput, multichannel device that can process 10 samples at once, dramatically improving the number of cells analyzed per patient.

The researchers were inspired by a microfluidic device with simple channel geometry, adapting it into an array of linear microchannels for multisample deformability cytometry (MS-DC). The 10 individual on-chip reservoirs only require 50 microliter samples. Cells are driven from the reservoirs into independent channels at 100 cells per second by distributing pressure evenly across the channels for simultaneous deformation. Using an inverted microscope that takes high speed movies with single cell resolution, and image analysis software the researchers developed, they can quantify the deformation of each sample within 10 minutes.

Breast and prostate cancer cell lines of different metastatic potential were analyzed by this MS-DC process. The highly metastatic breast cancer cell lines were more deformable, but the opposite was true in prostate cancer cells. This suggests that the correlation of deformability to metastatic potential is cancer type-specific.

The authors also showed that the technology could be used to investigate the effect of different doses of cytoskeletal drugs on cancer cell deformability. “We have studied tumor cell lines and drugs to establish the technique and show its relevance for cancer research,” said co-author Siva Vanapalli. “The next steps will be to test clinical samples.”

Source: “Multi-sample deformability cytometry of cancer cells,” by Shamim M. Ahmmed, Swastika S. Bithi, Adity A. Pore, Noshin Mubtasim, Caroline Schuster, Lauren S. Gollahon, and Siva A. Vanapalli, APL Bioengineering (2018). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5020992 .