Main Category: Medical Devices / Diagnostics
Also Included In: Stem Cell Research
Article Date: 18 Oct 2013 – 0:00 PDT
For any corrections of factual information, or to contact the editors please use our feedback form.
Please send any medical news or health news press releases to:
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under award CBET-0932510. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.
Current ratings for:
Microfluidic device that sorts cells by stiffness may help identify disease
Research into the stiffness of diseased cells is lacking, in part due to limits in technology. Researchers have developed a new technology to sort human cells according to their stiffness, which might one day help doctors identify certain diseases in patients, according to a new study.
The mechanical properties of cells are often an indicator of disease. Cancer cells are typically soft and squishy. When the malaria parasite is inside a red blood cell, for example, the cell is stiffer than normal. Sickle cells also vary in stiffness.
“There are no real techniques to sort cells by stiffness right now in large numbers,” said Alexander Alexeev, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Alexeev is an expert in fluid mechanics and a co-author on the study
The research team, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, hopes that their technology might one day aid doctors in the field to rapidly and more accurately diagnose disease.
Georgia Institute of Technology
Aside from testing for disease, the cell stiffness sorter could also be used in as a method for purifying and enriching an undifferentiated stem cell population from the differentiated cells, which would be useful for laboratory scientists.
MLA
Contact Our News Editors
“We’re assured the device is very sensitive to say that the soft cells are all soft, but what we don’t know is whether all the disease cells are soft,” Sulchek said.
If you write about specific medications or operations, please do not name health care professionals by name.
“The main problem is how to sort cells very rapidly because if we are looking at cancer cells, there are very, very few of them. So we need to look at thousands of millions of cells to capture maybe a hundred cancer cells.”
Note: Any medical information published on this website is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional. For more information, please read our terms and conditions.
“There are several microfluidic approaches, but there’s not a real device yet,” Alexeev said.
All opinions are moderated before being included (to stop spam). We reserve the right to amend opinions where we deem necessary.
“We show that we separate by stiffness, not by other factors,” Sulchek said.
The new research was scheduled to be published in the journal PLOS ONE. The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The researchers also have a patent on this technology.
Cells are injected into a microfluidic channel on one side of the device. As the cells move through the channel, they are forced to squeeze over a series of ridges that are fabricated at an angle to the channel. If the cells are very flexible, they will easily squeeze over the ridges and follow the fluid stream. But if the cells are stiffer, when they hit a ridge, they will slide along the angled ridge before squeezing over, causing the cells to move to one side, separating them from the softer cells. These ridges eventually separate a single stream of cells into two streams depending on the cells’ stiffness, which in some cases can be an indicator of a disease.
medical devices / diagnostics section for the latest news on this subject.
