Enrichment of Cancer Cells Using a High Throughput Contactless Dielectrophoretic (CDEP) Microfluidic Device

Selective concentration of microparticles is a very important process in many medical and biological applications such as early cancer detection. It has been shown that dielectrophoresis (DEP), the motion of a particle due to its polarization in the presence of a non-uniform electric field, is a method for enrichment of bioparticels based on their electrical properties and size [1, 2, 3]. Bioparticels can be concentrated using DEP by changing applied voltage and frequency, media and particles conductivity and permittivity, and geometry of microchannel and electrodes. DEP has been used to separate circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from clinical blood, breast tumor cells from CD34+ hemopoietic stem cells, breast tumor cells from peripheral blood, leukemia cells from blood.